Why is NASA sending bacteria into the sky on balloons during the eclipse
NASA released Paenibacillus xerothermodurans bacteria
The bacteria that will fly to the edge of space is a particular strain called Paenibacillus xerothermodurans. It was first isolated from soil outside a spacecraft-assembly facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 1973, says Parag Vaishampayan, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These bacteria form shields of spores that allow them to survive even when conditions turn deadly. It takes around 140 hours at 257 degrees Fahrenheit to kill 90 percent of these bacteria, Vaishampayan tells The Verge.
The microorganisms are dried onto the surface of two metal cards the size of a dog tag. One card will fly to the stratosphere, while one will remain on the ground to function as a control group. On eclipse day, the balloons will launch every 15 minutes or so from states that are in the path of the Moon’s shadow, Des Jardins says. They’ll fly for about two hours, reaching the stratosphere and eventually popping because of the pressure drop. Once they’re back on the ground (a parachute will slow down descent), the students will track them by GPS, recover the metal tags, and mail them back to NASA.
That’s when Vaishampayan and Smith will get to analyze how many bacteria have died, and whether their DNA has changed in any way. If some of them survive the flight, that might mean that these bacteria may have already survived a trip to the Red Planet as hitchhikers on a Mars rover. We don’t know for sure whether Paenibacillus xerothermodurans is actually on any Mars rover. (It was found outside the spacecraft-assembly facility, not on the spacecraft themselves, Vaishampayan says.) But even if it’s not, learning more about these resilient bacteria could help us understand how similar ones could behave on Mars, and help NASA better understand the risk of infecting other worlds.
“These are some of the most resilient types of bacteria that we know of
An update comming with what we have found out about Paenibacillus xerothermodurans
And the truth is stranger than fiction, stay tuned!!!
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
http://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16145668/eclipse-nasa-balloons-stratosphere-bacteria-life-mars
That is correct but needed to give a brief understanding of what up coming blogs
will be about, as it goes deeper than this
thanks for your comment as it helps call for the attention of this subject
Not indicating that the content you copy/paste is not your original work could be seen as plagiarism.
Some tips to share content and add value:
Repeated plagiarized posts are considered spam. Spam is discouraged by the community, and may result in action from the cheetah bot.
Creative Commons: If you are posting content under a Creative Commons license, please attribute and link according to the specific license. If you are posting content under CC0 or Public Domain please consider noting that at the end of your post.
If you are actually the original author, please do reply to let us know!
Thank You!
yes thank you for this notice
i will put my intent and thoughts and links in further blogs
very extrage experiment, maybe they are so evil that they want to make people sick, they lie all the time about anything, just research flat earth and you will see how all this space thinks are very fake, hope you can break the ilution and understand why nasa is full of crap
https://steemit.com/nasa/@redwards1/nasa-comedy-clips here some good material
Thanks mate, im trying to understand too
i do have more on this subject that i will blog
https://steemit.com/science/@jarhead01/nasa-launched-strain-across-the-us-during-eclipse-or-paenibacillus-xerothermodurans