Flight Schedules Indianapolis | Info About Maritime Education Job Fair

Is it possible that life on Earth did not emerge here, but got started from seedlings carried inside meteorites from Mars? The hypothesis, called transpermia, is intriguing, and will be put to a test beginning in the year 2011.

In an initiative of the Planetary Society, a group of scientists will send a collection of life forms on a 34-month trip to the Martian moon, Phobos, and back. Why to Phobos? The simple answer is that the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, is allowing the organisms to hitch a ride on a probe known as Phobos-Grunt. Designated the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE), the collection of tiny astronauts was loaded into a canister in June 2009, because initially, the Grunt probe was scheduled for launch in October of the same year. Tight schedules and a narrow launch window, allowing for departure from Earth only every 26 months, led Roscosmos to delay to the 2011 date. But rational for the LIFE experiment will not change.

What is Known about Interplanetary Transfer of Living Organisms?

As this writer and his co-author, Ben Weiss, noted in the article "Did Life Come from Another World?" (Scientific American, 2005), from studies of several meteorites identified as having originated on Mars, scientists have determined that some microorganisms could survive catapulting from a Mars-sized planet by a comet impact. Similarly, it’s known that organisms embedded within a rock traveling through space could survive entry through Earth’s atmosphere. If life also can survive a transfer through interplanetary space, the final piece of the transpermia puzzle will be in place. Because of the short transit times possible at least for a fraction of space traveling rocks, the Grunt probe, providing nearly three years in interplanetary space, is a good simulation of a Mars-to-Earth transpermia scenario.