A satellite image of the southern pole moon and the Schrodinger basin
NASA/Science Pictures Library
The moon may be more hostile to life than we thought, which increases the risk of the future moon tasks that contaminate the important moon.
Space tasks should follow policies on “protecting planets” to avoid pollution of other objects of the solar system with microbes from Earth – which may mislead us to think that these bodies have their own forms of life.
Many of our protection on Earth, such as the atmosphere and the magnetic field, are not found on the moon. As a result, its surface is exposed to high -energy molecules from outer space, maximum temperatures and deadly ultraviolet light from the sun, making it a harsh environment for living organisms to survive.
For this reason, most astronomers are essentially sterile moon. The Space Research Committee places it in the second lowest category of planetary protection, along with Venus and comets, for bodies that “have a distant opportunity only that the pollution of the spacecraft that transports it can display investigations.”
But new research before Stefano Burton At the NASA Godard Space Center, his colleagues suggest that life may be able to stay for several days, or perhaps more than a week, in some areas surrounding the columns of the moon, where NASA’s Ethnis’s future Erts’ mission plans. This means that there are risks of pollution of these areas, which leads to false positives in life -looking studies.
“We will return to the moon. We will leave traces. We need more work to understand the type of effects that we will leave and how to reduce it,” Burton told the European Science Conference (EPSC) in Helsinki, Finland on September 12.
Burton and his team looked at five commonly resistant creatures of harsh environments, including black mold (Aspergillus NigerAnd bacteria Staphylococci and Bacillus Subtilis, She tested the amount of ultraviolet light that they could bear in the laboratory. Then they collected data for UV levels, exposure to the sun and temperature fluctuations on the moon and used this to produce a map that shows the place where the five creatures could live for a period of not less than one day.
Burton said that all living organisms can live in well -lit areas, outside permanently shaded areas where the sun and ultraviolet rays cannot reach, and these well -lit areas are possible goals to explore the moon. The black mold was more difficult, and surviving in large areas for up to seven days.
“It is a very important study, and it is clear that if there is a danger [of contamination]Then certain measures must be taken, but it must be understood as well [such actions] “It will have economic consequences,” he says. Stas ParaPash At the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. For example, space agencies may decide that the equipment will be sterilized more strictly, and this will affect the cost of missions.
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