kguk
07-01-2009, 08:06 PM
Earth Life Headed for Mars Moon
Russia is pushing forward on a robotic mission to Mars dubbed Phobos-Grunt - now seemingly on a countdown clock that ticks away for an October launch.
If the project is on track and off the ground by that time, Phobos-Grunt would arrive at the red planet in August of next year.
The project also includes deployment of a Chinese sub-satellite -Yinghuo-1 meaning "Firefly-1" - that will gauge the Martian past in terms of how surface water on the red planet did a disappearing act.
Phobos-Grunt is intended also to cast an orbital eye on Mars too, but then plop down on Phobos - one of that planet's two moons, scrape up on-the-spot samples and then transport those extraterrestrial tidbits to Earth in July 2012. As it swoops by Earth, the spacecraft is to release a capsule containing all the samples gathered on Phobos, to land on Earth.
But what caught my eye was another payload on this heady mission - detailed in a couple of recent articles - that Russia is also dispatching on the flight the "world's hardiest" or "toughest" organisms found here on Earth, sealed up in a bio-container for the Earth-to-Mars/Mars to Earth three year trek. The bio-module will provide 30 small tubes for individual microbe samples...
I also contacted Catharine Conley, the acting Planetary Protection Officer at NASA Headquarters about this mission.
"The Phobos-Grunt mission intends to meet orbital lifetime requirements, so by COSPAR policy there is no official limit on the number of organisms the spacecraft may carry," Conley advised. Sending pure cultures of organisms that could not possibly survive on Mars, she added, would pose a minimal contamination hazard, and this includes most organisms relevant to human exploration.
"However, I am uncomfortable with sending native tundra samples so close to Mars, because this is a location on Earth that could possibly contain organisms capable of adapting to Martian conditions," and to do so "seems ill-advised," Conley told SPACE.com...
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090107-tw-russia-phobos-life.html
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F07%2F1447217
Russia is pushing forward on a robotic mission to Mars dubbed Phobos-Grunt - now seemingly on a countdown clock that ticks away for an October launch.
If the project is on track and off the ground by that time, Phobos-Grunt would arrive at the red planet in August of next year.
The project also includes deployment of a Chinese sub-satellite -Yinghuo-1 meaning "Firefly-1" - that will gauge the Martian past in terms of how surface water on the red planet did a disappearing act.
Phobos-Grunt is intended also to cast an orbital eye on Mars too, but then plop down on Phobos - one of that planet's two moons, scrape up on-the-spot samples and then transport those extraterrestrial tidbits to Earth in July 2012. As it swoops by Earth, the spacecraft is to release a capsule containing all the samples gathered on Phobos, to land on Earth.
But what caught my eye was another payload on this heady mission - detailed in a couple of recent articles - that Russia is also dispatching on the flight the "world's hardiest" or "toughest" organisms found here on Earth, sealed up in a bio-container for the Earth-to-Mars/Mars to Earth three year trek. The bio-module will provide 30 small tubes for individual microbe samples...
I also contacted Catharine Conley, the acting Planetary Protection Officer at NASA Headquarters about this mission.
"The Phobos-Grunt mission intends to meet orbital lifetime requirements, so by COSPAR policy there is no official limit on the number of organisms the spacecraft may carry," Conley advised. Sending pure cultures of organisms that could not possibly survive on Mars, she added, would pose a minimal contamination hazard, and this includes most organisms relevant to human exploration.
"However, I am uncomfortable with sending native tundra samples so close to Mars, because this is a location on Earth that could possibly contain organisms capable of adapting to Martian conditions," and to do so "seems ill-advised," Conley told SPACE.com...
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090107-tw-russia-phobos-life.html
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F07%2F1447217