Starship Asterisk*

brutus inquisitor wrote:In pictures of the small, it would be very helpful to have a scale. Please.
A most enjoyable picture of a fascinating critter.

brutus inquisitor wrote:In pictures of the small, it would be very helpful to have a scale. Please.
A most enjoyable picture of a fascinating critter.

smitty wrote:
Can anyone explain the rationale for attempting intentionally to send tardigrades to Phobos? At first glance, this sounds to me like a very bad idea! Had it succeeded, then if/when we find extraterrestrial life how will we know from whence it came? Maybe there already are (native) tardigrades on Phobos! Maybe the ones on earth originated there! If we send some there intentionally, how will we ever know? In the past, we've always been meticulous to avoid contaminating extraterrestrial bodies we've visited, or at least so I thought. So what gives with this Russian Fobos-Grunt mission, and was it approved by any international scientific body?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Interplanetary_Flight_Experiment wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE or Phobos LIFE) was an interplanetary mission developed by the Planetary Society. It consisted of sending selected microorganisms on a three-year interplanetary round-trip in a small capsule aboard the Russian Fobos-Grunt spacecraft in 2011, which was a failed sample-return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. The Fobos-Grunt mission failed to leave Earth-orbit, and was destroyed. The goal was to test whether selected organisms can survive a few years in deep space by flying them through interplanetary space. The experiment would have tested one aspect of transpermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another.

Barry E. DiGregorio, the director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, criticised the LIFE experiment on the Fobos-Grunt mission as a violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 due to its risk of contaminating Phobos or Mars with the microbial spores and live bacteria it contains. While the mission was supposed to land and return from Phobos, a moon of Mars, the risk to Mars itself would have been from the possibility of Fobos-Grunt losing control and crash landing on the planet. It was speculated that the heat-resistant extremophile bacteria would have been particularly able to survive such a crash, on the basis that heat resistant bacteria Microbispora survived the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.>>

smitty wrote:Can anyone explain the rationale for attempting intentionally to send tardigrades to Phobos? At first glance, this sounds to me like a very bad idea! Had it succeeded, then if/when we find extraterrestrial life how will we know from whence it came? Maybe there already are (native) tardigrades on Phobos! Maybe the ones on earth originated there! If we send some there intentionally, how will we ever know?

In the past, we've always been meticulous to avoid contaminating extraterrestrial bodies we've visited, or at least so I thought. So what gives with this Russian Fobos-Grunt mission, and was it approved by any international scientific body?

Anthony Barreiro wrote:This looks to me like a very, ahem, well crafted image, a bit early for April fool's day. Nothing could really have a mouth that looks like a plastic hose attachment, the skin around the feet looks like frayed twill, and the moss is obviously crocheted. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Anthony Barreiro wrote:This looks to me like a very, ahem, well crafted image, a bit early for April fool's day. Nothing could really have a mouth that looks like a plastic hose attachment, the skin around the feet looks like frayed twill, and the moss is obviously crocheted. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Chris Peterson wrote:Here's a head closeup at a different angle, that makes it a little more clear what the mouth structure is like. There are lots of good images on the Internet; this page has some real nice ones.

Chris Peterson wrote:If you're having trouble sleeping at night, maybe you need one of these little stuffed toys...

Click to view full size image

DifferentStripes wrote:I wonder why a creature that can survive almost anywhere would choose to live in such a lush, verdant environment as moss. What selection pressure drives it to seek such a specific habitat?