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Astrobiology

Microbes On The Moon? Really?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 4, 2017
Filed under

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

17 responses to “Microbes On The Moon? Really?”

  1. Bob Mahoney says:
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    I don’t know, I’d give him a break:

    (a) While we are fairly certain that the Moon is lifeless…a remote possibility exists that there’s something there. We haven’t looked under every rock and objects from elsewhere have been hitting the Moon for a long time. Can anyone claim to be 100% certain?

    (b) Let us not forget that the Apollo protocols (including the construction of the LRL) are the precursor (and not a minor one) to all subsequent discussion of such things.

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    There are certainly microbes on the Moon, in a dormant state in the Apollo, Surveyor and other spacecraft. They aren’t dangerous to us since they are originally from Earth. The current primary goal of the Planetary Protection Program is not to protect Earth but rather to prevent, or at least minimize, contamination of Mars with terrestrial organisms so as to have some chance of detecting current or former Martian life, if it exists.

    Finally, most microbes are tiny. That’s why they are called …. microbes.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Future SF novel in the making: microbes morph, benefitting from radiation and survival of the fittest, the latter being infectious critters that turn humans into …wait for it!…

      ALIENS!!!

      • fcrary says:
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        Except for the aliens part, that’s _Andromeda_Strain_. The book, not the movie, involved terrestrial life which got into the thermosphere, mutated, diverged from surface species and was then returned by a spacecraft.

        • Bob Mahoney says:
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          I have absolutely no recollection of the crystalline life form in AS being of terrestrial origin and I’ve read the novel & seen the movie (I used it in my science class) numerous times. Are you speaking of the (inferior) TV remake with Benjamin Bratt?

          • fcrary says:
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            No, I mean the original book by Michael Crichton. Although, now that you mention it, I believe the author left the origin of the life form ambiguous. But one of the characters (Dr. Stone, I think) definitely speculated about a terrestrial but mutated origin for dangerous species returned to Earth.

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            That doesn’t jump to mind for me, and I reread the book within the past year or two. Now I’m going to have to go get the book (I think an early-edition pulp pb on the edge of coming apart…hand-me-down from my dad & older brother) off the way-top shelf waaay upstairs and double-check. Sigh.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’ll save you some time (and wear on a collector’s item.) I’ve got an electronic version and they are easier to search. Day 3, chapter 12:

            “The report suggested that bacteria could have left the surface of the earth eons ago, when life was just beginning to emerge from the oceans and the hot, baked continents . Such bacteria would depart before the fishes, before the primitive mammals, long before the first ape-man. The bacteria would head up into the air, and slowly ascend until they were literally in space. Once there, they might evolve into unusual forms, perhaps even learning to derive energy for life directly from the sun, instead of requiring food as an energy source. These organisms might also be capable of direct conversion of energy to matter. Leavitt himself suggested the analogy…”

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            What would be the mechanism propelling these little beasties upwards? And how would they acquire the energy needed to leave Earth capture?

          • fcrary says:
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            I didn’t say I believed it, just that the idea was mentioned in a science fiction novel. But, now that you mention it…

            Material from the surface is transported up to the upper atmosphere. It just has to be small enough to be lifted by updrafts, eddy diffusion, or whatever. Long-lasting dust in the stratosphere is a common result from volcanic eruptions. If dust can get up there, I don’t see why bacteria couldn’t. Let’s see… If I did it right, a 0.3 micron bacteria (diameter, and about as small as they get) in a 2 m/s updraft (4.4 mph) could get up to 50 km. That’s high enough to be exposed to hard UV and charged particle radiation, and the settling time to significantly lower altitudes would probably be months.

            I guess that means the author of that novel didn’t quite get the numbers right in terms of the time they would remain at those altitudes. (Not surprising, since his record was a bit hit or miss when it came to details.) But the existence of bacteria at those altitudes seems reasonable.

    • fcrary says:
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      Looking up how long Surveyor 3 was on the Moon before the samples were returned (two and a half years), I can across some might have been a false positive; recontamination due to flawed handling after collection.

      In any case, it would be interesting to repeat and expand on this experiment. Both as a collection of samples from a ~1967-1972 vehicle (i.e. after fifty years on the Moon) and some shorter duration exposures (e.g. a exposed plate on a modern sample return mission.) I know there are theoretical estimates of survivability of microbes, but there are all sorts of issues the theories could have missed. Some actual data would be nice. This is fairly central to the whole idea of meteoritic transport of microbes between Earth and Mars.

  3. J Fincannon says:
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    I recall that Carl Sagan speculated on microbes possibly being under the lunar surface where there might be better temperatures and some water.

    Sagan, Carl. “BIOLOGICAL CONTAMINATION OF THE MOON.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 46.4 (1960): 396–402.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
    “… Because of its great potential importance, the admittedly very speculative possibility must be raised that life arose on the Moon before the secondary lunar atmosphere was lost to space. Conditions on the Moon 5 billion years ago were probably not very different from conditions on the Earth 5 billion years ago. Recent thinking on the origin of life on this planet is increasingly inclined toward a very rapid origin of the first self-reproducing system. If a similar event also occurred on the Moon, natural selection may be expected to have kept pace with the increasingly more severe lunar environment, at least for some period of time. If subsurface conditions exist similar to those described in the preceding paragraph, then the possibility of an extant lunar parabiology must not be dismissed in as cavalier a manner as it has been in the past.”… “Organisms shielded from solar illumination, perhaps in congealed dust matrix interstices, might survive cosmic radiation for 1 billion years or more; lunar subsurface temperatures are too low to impede survival.”

    Sagan had proposed that it would be best to do robotic testing and deep core drill sampling (10s of meters below) to more temperate depths where he speculated life could exist. Somewhere a consensus must have been reached (at NASA or the scientific community?) that life cannot exist within the lunar surface. However I do not see robotic testing that provides data for this conclusion (Apollo only reached down 3 meters). So Dr. Green has some basis for his statement.

    We are very lucky about there not being dangerous microbes on the lunar surface since 1) obviously the astronauts got covered with lunar dust as well as breathed and ingested it so they were going to bring it back, 2) we did not send any animals to the surface first to test lunar dust/surface safety, 3) the “containment facility” was obviously not air tight (one astronaut commented on ants going to and from it), 4) once they landed in the ocean the door popped open to expose the Earth to any possible microbes, 5) the astronauts themselves were not in plastic bubbles but exposed to the ocean and air befor ebeing escorted to the “containment facility”. A better approach would have been lifting the capsule onto the ship and placing it in a air tight enclosure.

    Oh well, we survived anyway.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Ok, ok, make fun if you want; but when we are attacked by killer microbes, don’t come crying here…

      • J Fincannon says:
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        Who said I was making fun of there being microbes? I was making fun of the pathetic attempt to prevent backward contamination.

        I still await some scientist to show how they proved there are no microbes below the lunar surface.

  4. John AO says:
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    Sounds to me like some congressman has a friend who needs a do-nothing high-paying job.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Sounds to me like someone has thought seriously about the risk of contamination, and is doing something about it.