ESA Conducts Mars Terraforming Experiments On ISS 181
geegel writes "Space is a hostile environment for living things, but small organisms on the Expose-E experiment unit outside Europe's Columbus ISS laboratory module have resisted the solar UV radiation, cosmic rays, vacuum and varying temperatures for 18 months. A certain lichen seems to be particularly happy in open space."
Let us get this out of the way... (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our Mars-terraforming lichen overlords.
fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz (Score:5, Funny)
Then come back to earth and take us over. Underworld: Rise of the Lichen. Gonna net to get some space reindeer to save us.
Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, exposure to gamma radiation is going to cause the lichen to turn into a giant green(-er) beast of unstoppable power whenever it gets angry.
Fortunately, lichens are pretty mellow.
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Who could have thunk?
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We'll be fine as long as their powerz level isn't over 9000.
Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz (Score:5, Funny)
Underworld: Rise of the Lichen
It's funny because you likened the lichen to Lycans.
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I can't stop laughing at your post. Next to Lampshade Hanging [tvtropes.org], my favorite trope has to be Explaining the Joke [tvtropes.org]. Joss, is that you [youtube.com]?
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Of the space variety (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of the space variety (Score:5, Funny)
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* vacuum, vacuum very much! *
Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future. At this point we don't even have an idea when humans will finally get there. The real goal of this research is to understand the limits to life in extreme environments. This can help us to better understand where we might find life and whether it is possible that there might still be life on Mars today. Glad to see some useful research being done on the ISS after all the time and effort to get it up there.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Funny)
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Dan Simmions did that in The Rise of Endymion.
s/Simmions/Simmons/ (Score:2)
Damn. That'll teach me to use preview.
Re:Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future.
Actually terraforming a planet with plant life isn't necessarily a slow process at all. If we agree on the idea of human made global warming we have made substantial changes to a planet's ecosystem in a short amount of time.
Given the growth rate of a variety of micro organisms and small less complicated plant life we can induce a massive change in Mar's ecosystem in a short amount of time.
Here is a simple example. Given the growth rate of a species of plant that can survive on Mars. X rate of growth over Y distance. Without any natural predators the upper limit of that growth is R based on resources. Until we hit R in general we are talking near exponential growth (not taking into account localize competition with thins out the existing population.) Given this basic idea the mobility of plant life on Mars could be substantial (We are talking a radius increase of hundreds of miles per year.) You could literally cover an entire planet in a plant (again barring predators and R limits) with the lifetime of a human being.
Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but, if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars there is nothing preventing us from launching a giant rocket to Mars fill with a good cocktail of microbes, algeas, etc and seed bombing the piss outta the planet and letting natural selection establish an ecosystem. I argue the opposite. Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, advanced technology might cut that to as little as ten-thousand years . . .
--Greg (Why I lost interest in terraforming)
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The hard part is keeping the oxygen there. Between the lack of a respectable magnetic field and lower gravity, most of the atmosphere will just spin off and/or get blown away by solar radiation.
Re:Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
But what will you end up with?
Mars has no magnetosphere, and plants are not going to add one. Radiation will still hit hard, and air will still be stripped away by the solar winds.
Mars has little air, and plants don't generally create new air (they pull carbon from existing air), so it will still be airless.
Given the above, it will also still be freezing (a problem plants will have on Mars that ironically is less of an issue in space, where vacuum is an excellent insulator).
So how "terraformed" will it be? Though it would be cool to have something living there, even if it's not us.
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Mars has no magnetosphere, and plants are not going to add one. Radiation will still hit hard, and air will still be stripped away by the solar winds.
Drop a bunch of ice asteroids to build up the atmosphere, and then one every century or so - or perhaps a constant barrage of small chunks that are vaporized in the upper atmosphere would be preferable? Either way, that should keep the air pressure up, until we can develop the technology to reboot planetary cores.
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Pardon the Star Trek analogy here, but wouldn't that be like flinging water balloons into a dry riverbed?
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Someone should get right on the technology (and engineering) of how to move billions of tons of mass out in space.
I think you underestimate the challenge of doing that.
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if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars
This one will be hard, Mars is probably too borderline with is invorement to say with high certainity, even if "we haven't found anything yet"
Also, I'm not sure if dumping waste would be productive...yes, some life will hang on; but the resulting biosphere won't be very useful to us.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
That doesn't make sense. You'd need to lift the products out of Mars's gravity well to get them to Earth - I assume that you didn't mean people to live in the toxic dump planet. If you have that kind of technology, you'd be much better off building your industrial base on asteroids; not only do they have negligible gravity well, but several of them are actually composed of almost pure metals.
Planets are too valuable to waste as toxic dumps, and space-based industry can deliver anywhere with the speed of a shooting star ;).
Re:Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
Why convert Mars into a meat-friendly environment? We already have one of those, and given similar engineering effort, we could turn Venus back into a second. Mars, by contrast, is ALREADY a very nice environment for silicon-based life -- by which I mean AI robots and so forth.
I consider AI robots to be the future of intelligence, which we are blessed/fated/doomed to create. They will absolutely ADORE the cold no-oxygen environment, and the low light conditions are fine for fission-/fusion-/other-powered critters as they will be. So don't mess Mars up, because they can't happily live here on Earth.
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Timeout. No more conversations with the Roomba. Outside for you.
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True, but the resulting ecosystem is not necessarily stable and self-sustaining. As fast as it builds up, it could suddenly collapse.
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LOL
OK, do everything you have ever done, but over there...
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Sure it'll take ages, so start now. (Score:2)
But if we start now, maybe by the time we get there, earth based life will be well established.
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Yes, but it was way behind schedule and for a long time had only a minimum crew. They needed to spend all their time just maintaining the station which didn't leave any time for scientific research. Now, finally, they have a full crew and can actually get down to business.
Re:Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
You misunderstand. Actually building the thing has involved a whole lot of new engineering and scientific knowledge.
Doing experiments now it's up there is fine, but just getting it up there taught us a lot (including, the shuttle was a bad idea).
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What, we hadn't figured that out yet by the time ISS construction started?
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...meanwhile, K'Breel was preparing another galzak inspiring message to the Council.
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It's not open space... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's near earth orbit. INSIDE the magnetosphere which removes a huge amount of radiation from the equation.
Big difference there.
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Mars (along with Venus) do not have a magnetosphere in the same way Earth does. They have ionospheres that operate in similar fashion but the magnetic field only deflects a bit of the solar wind.
Re:It's not open space... (Score:5, Informative)
Not that big a difference, and not in the way you think.
The magnetosphere does nothing about UV radiation, which is the biggest short-term threat from the sun to living things. If you're above the ozone layer, you're getting almost full-strength illumination in UV.
And although the Earth's magnetosphere diverts a lot of the solar wind, it does it in such a way that many high energy particles are trapped in the Van Allen belts, creating regions of near-Earth orbit that have much more particle radiation than the heliosphere. The solar wind has particles up to 100 eV; the inner Van Allen, which the ISS passes through, has energies up to 100 MeV.
So no, it's not 'open space'. It's near Earth orbit, which in some respects is worse than deep space.
Either way, it's a brutal test of endurance for any living thing.
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the inner Van Allen, which the ISS passes through, has energies up to 100 MeV.
The ISS passes under almost all of the inner Van Allen belt. I understand there is a lobe over South America which the ISS occasionally grazes. It is a better radiation environment than deep space.
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CO2 is by far the most important contribution in the case of Venusian temperature. Sulfuric acid just makes the envirment toxic from our point of view.
Venus is a hard case, it doesn't have plate tectonics. Carbon would be mostly left on the surface, eventually returning to atmosphere after reacting with, also released, oxygen.
Venus (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Venus (Score:4, Funny)
Why go to venus when we can simply terraform earth to have a venus-like atmosphere? We're already well on our way! Mars is a much better place to escape to... I mean, investigate.
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And now, thanks to the ISS, we'll have both topping for our pizza and athlete's foot when we get there.
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And now, thanks to the ISS, we'll have both topping for our pizza and athlete's foot when we get there.
Next 'pizza' research: exactly what kind of cheese is the Moon made from? This could solve our mozarella shortages. I think we should be told.
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Because... IT’S A TRAP! [youtube.com]
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I don't understand what the obsession with going to Mars is. Frankly I think Venus is where we should target our efforts. It has an atmosphere (albeit hazardous to human life) and is about 20% closer to us then Mars. Granted, Venus' atmosphere is about 97% CO2 but I would think that it would be a lot easier to bioengineer something which would survive and thrive in the Venutian atmosphere while changing the CO2 to Oxygen.
Probably something to do with Venus's high temperatures and high air pressure.
"In fact, atmospheric pressure on Venus is about 90 times the atmospheric pressure on the Earth. This would be comparable to water pressure 1000 meters below the surface of the ocean." [whecn.edu]
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Well, then you would have molecules containing large amount of carbon and also free O2 in the same place. Both in immense quantities. In an enviroment with known huge lighting strikes. See the problem?
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Venus is also 800 degrees in the shade at a hundred atmospheres of pressure with acid rain that will dissolve most of the materials we make spacecraft out of in a matter of hours.
Mars also has an atmosphere of mostly CO2, except the temperature, pressure and chemistry is closer to the top of mount everest than the center of an erupting volcano.
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except the temperature, pressure and chemistry is closer to the top of mount everest than the center of an erupting volcano.
You are off by an order of magnitude (or more). It's more like the temperature, pressure and chemistry at 100,000 feet (references sited in another post above). Everest is only 1/4 the way there (by altitude), and since atmospheric pressure is a *logarithmic* function of altitude, that makes a bigger difference than you might expect.
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Forgive me. My memory of the atmospheric context of mars was not as good as it was for venus. The point however remains valid. Mars is a far more hospitable planet than venus.
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Well, there are three reasons for the 'obsession' with Mars.
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Regarding 3 - to be fair, Venus can provide some serious aerobraking.
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Which doesn't help at all with the problem of getting there in the first place.
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Although we've here on earth found some extremophile life forms that survive or even thrive at temperatures and pressure encountered on Venus but nearly all (simple) living organisms we know could cope with Martian conditions.
I would say it's not difficult to see the low hanging fruit.
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The conditions on Mars are comparatively benign, 6-10 mBar with a temperature from just above freezing to about -120 degC or -200 degF.
On Venus you'd have to get rid of nearly all CO2 and (for pressure) 95% of all gasses, on Mars you 'only' have to add some greenhouse gases and ideally a lot of oxygen.
Transferring various minerals into g
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It's because Mars is the "Red Planet". Don't you see, it's all marketing.
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I don't understand what the obsession with going to Mars is.
Mars has ground. It's really that simple. Look at all of the things on Earth either built on the ground or made of stuff obtained from the ground. In comparison, there is nothing permanently in the sky on Earth. That situation would have to be reversed on Venus. You'd have to make almost everything out of the Venus atmosphere (that yields carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen). Maybe you could run some sort of quick mining trips on the surface using balloons or harvest dust blown from the surface (it should
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The problem is that the asteroid is coming in at someth
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Methinks the sulfuric acid rain and immense pressure at the surface might disagree with you there...
Due to the extremely hostile conditions on the surface, current technology disallows any possibility of colonizing the surface of Venus soon. However, there have been recent speculations about the possibility of developing extensive "floating cities" in the atmosphere of Venus in the future.[125] This concept is based on the atmospheric conditions approximately fifty kilometres above the surface of the planet, where atmospheric pressures and temperatures are thought to be similar to those of Earth. Proposals suggest that manned exploration can be conducted from aerostat vehicles, followed in the longer term by permanent settlements.[125] The existence of dangerous quantities of volatile acids at these heights, however, precludes any short term settlements.
-wikipedia
Not to mention plants tend to not want to uptake CO2 anymore above certain concentrations (concentrations much less than 97%). Look into a protein called RuBisCO. Mars has a better potential for being colonized using current technology.
Slow rotation of Venus (Score:3, Informative)
Venus rotates on the order of "once per year". WHile this doesn't mean much with its current thick atmosphere, it's really, really not conductive to Earth-like enviroments. Youd would get variations between the harshest Antarctic night and Sahara heat with separation of 100 days between them. The atmosphere would freeze solid on the night side, with day side dominated by evaporation and completelly dry.
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You've got a lot of replies talking about gravity, CO2, magnetospheric issues, etc.
These problems drop away when you consider a floating city [wikipedia.org] (our atmosphere: 70% N2 / 20% O2 is a lifting gas on Venus). Besides the awesome sci-fi factor, we have the technology, almost literally right now, to put something like this together. Can anyone tell me why it wouldn't work? (apart from funding problems).
Venus plus X (Score:2)
Because I don't want to live in a place where there is absolutely positively no water, no hydrogen
at all. None. (almost as bad as no nitrogen on Mars -- don't get me started). Oh yeah, acid.
More trouble than it's worth, I'd rather live IN Mercury, ON Ganyamede, or UNDER Ceres.
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It's hot enough to melt metal there. Way harder for machines to exist, impossible for humans. The atmosphere isn't what would kill you, we can live in no atmospghere at all with the proper space suit, it's the extreme heat. I seriously doubt it would be easy to design a suit that could keep you alive on Venus.
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The mean temperature of Venus is around 460C. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times that of earth. While I don't expect to walk on a distant planet in my lifetime, I would certainly hope we would do terraforming so that humands can one day walk on a distant planet, and this pressure is about 50% higher than the current human tolerance record. There is also no water - and I don't think there is any form of life on earth which can survive without water, at a temperature which will quickly boil any water it mig
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I imagine since Mars has lost its atmosphere, it must have had pretty loose hold on it to be so easily stripped away.
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Rather I suggested that absent a strong magnetosphere, the combined mass of Mars and a thicker atmosphere is below the threshold such that gravity could prevent significant loss of said atmosphere over the last few billion years.
Either that, or Venus is currently losing atmosphere at a similar rate to Mars and simply had acquired a much thicker atmosph
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Active volcanically but in a weird way; no plate tectonics, total resurfacing of the planet once in a while. Pretty much whatever gets released or falls on it from space, stays on the surface / in the atmosphere.
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You would just need something that could react with the atmosphere to form an inert solid - that would reduce the density of the atmosphere and the pressure.
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I don't think there's much point to trying to deal with Venus as it is, so the excess atmosphere has got to go.
Pump the excess atmosphere out into space, or find a way to turn most of it into a stable, innocuous solid or liquid compound. Then deal with the excess solar radiation coming in (Make the planet more reflective? Change the orbit? [please be careful not to disturb Earth's orbit.] Put a shade in orbit around Venus?)
Re:Venus (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think there's much point to trying to deal with Venus as it is, so the excess atmosphere has got to go.
The solution is obvious, the atmosphere that is in excess on Venus should be moved to Mars.
Then both problems are elegantly solved at once.
I'll leave the trivial implementation details to you.
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There are already organisms that are adapted to this kind of extreme; they are right here on earth.
Take for instance, the chemotrophic marine organisms near deep-sea trenches and vents. Specifically, the sulfur reducing varieties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_bacteria
The hard part is getting them to stay afloat in the lighter part of the atmosphere, in or above the sulfuric acid haze, where the temperature and pressure are more conducive to their habitation.
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyc
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I shouldn't think that too difficult.
There have been bacteria recovered from deep rock cores that survive under high pressure, low energy environment by carrying out their biological processes very, very slowly. Other bacteria have been found that can survive the near boiling temperatures of thermal springs.
In fact, bacteria that are adapted to live in the supercritical water of deep ocean thermal vents would be a great start. We're talking 400 degrees C, but still liquid because of the immense pressure.
Rise of the Lichens (Score:2)
Werewolves are on the ISS? Sweet!
shameless plug to ISS videos (Score:2, Interesting)
ESA just launched a new website for hosting videos - check it out
http://multimedia.esa.int/content/search?SearchText=iss&SearchButton=Go [esa.int]
http://multimedia.esa.int/content/search?SearchText=mars&SearchButton=Go [esa.int]
Pun in 3, 2, 1... (Score:2)
Surviving exposure is different than living (Score:3, Insightful)
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I hope there isn't life on Mars already .. (Score:2)
Because after the first phase of this biological warfare invasion one of us is going to be in big poopoo ...
Meanwhile... (Score:2, Funny)
Obama cancelled NASA.
Space Transportation System Orbital Vehicle Man (Score:2)
Space is a hostile environment for living things
In fact, they boil at absolute zero
And there's no matter there for them to live off of
If you tried
But then I'm no scientist
I just work here
As a Space Transportation System Orbital Vehicle maintainer
A Space Transportation System Orbital Vehicle-man
And think I'm going to be late
Getting home for dinner
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just work here
As a Space Transportation System Orbital Vehicle maintainer
From your poetry I thought you might be a Vogon ;)
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The reason you would freeze in space (besides boiling, which is an endothermic process) is because you radiate energy via infrared light faster than you acquire it via bumping into hot space particles.
Where's William Shatner when you need him? (Score:2)
Khaaaaaaan!
It's not terraforming (Score:2)
These experiments are not about terraforming (Mars, for example, does not have a vacuum at the surface), they are about the exchange of biological material between the Earth and Mars. We know that material can be sent between the two planets relatively gently (by big meteorite impacts); this research makes it almost a certainty that some life could survive the trip.
Are we ready, this time? I sure hope so. (Score:2)
But I'm not too sure. We are still pretty uncivilized. Maybe a few more trips through the great red filter [messagebase.net].