I was reading about a probe launched to Europa and they deliberately crashed it into Jupiter so any microorganisms on the probe would not get onto Europa. Can you tell me about these microorganisms?
2006-08-24 18:49:31 · 6 answers · asked by Professor Armitage 7 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_%28moon%29#Subsurface_ocean
2006-08-24 19:14:46 · update #1
Great link by wm omnibus. According to this article the organisms are basically in a state of suspended animation while in space and when they thaw out they revive.
2006-08-25 06:15:11 · update #2
You might be surprised at how tough some of those little "buggers" can be.
"The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source. "
We recovered this colony of bacteria from Surveyor 3 on the Moon. Check it out at the below link.
2006-08-24 19:20:19 · answer #1 · answered by wm_omnibus 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
None of the organisms can actually survive, the reason they don't want to contaminate Europa is because when a lander is finally sent NASA doesn't want to discover microbes and not know if they came from Earth or are indigenous. So its not that they are worried about accidently colonizing Jupiter's moon, its that there is speculation on whether life could arise on Europa. We don't want to find 'evidence' of life there and find out later it was just garbage from one of our probes.
2006-08-25 01:57:32 · answer #2 · answered by Joe 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
There are lots of tiny creatures that can live without air or light, a few that can live without water and many that aren't bothered by ordinary cleansers. Discover magazine had a short article on it a few months ago and how that was causing trouble with the search for life on Mars. Every bit of living stuff that the scientists found was stuff that had hitchhiked on our probes.
I know that they are very small and have really long names.
2006-08-25 02:02:11 · answer #3 · answered by anyone 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The micro-organisms in question were only if their were any on the probe, they were not a fact. We did not want to take that chance of contaminating Europa if there were any at all on the probe.
2006-08-25 04:06:35 · answer #4 · answered by bprice215 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Where did you read this? I would like to read about it..
2006-08-25 02:00:13 · answer #5 · answered by genuine♥ 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
none alive found yet...read this...
2006-08-25 02:02:20 · answer #6 · answered by Urban Hermit 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋