Some Earth Bacteria Hardy Enough To Survive Harsh Environments

The clean rooms used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to assemble spacecraft aren't as clean as one would think.

According to Nature, samples taken from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center show some pretty hardy bacteria that have managed to not only survive the harsh cleaning processes with harsh cleansers and ultraviolet light, but actually thrive.

This isn't surprising to some.

"The rooms are not sterile," says Michel Viso, an astrobiologist at the French space agency CNES in Paris.

Researchers the JPL facility at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, found each of the three sites possessed very different bacterial communities. They discovered strains in the spore-forming Bacillus family that had never been seen before as well as some extremophile bacteria that thrive in extreme conditions, like Methylobacterium, which is resistant to high levels of chlorine.

"It is, by nature, an extreme environment; it's not surprising that extremophiles exist there," says John Rummel, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA headquarters, Washington DC, of the clean rooms.

Researchers catalogued the bacteria found to compare against anything brought back on space missions. This will help determine if any extraterrestrial bacteria is actually being encountered, or merely a stowaway of sorts that managed to survive the trip.

"We now understand a little better what type of [Earthly] organisms we're dealing with," says Catharine Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer.

There are strict national and international regulations, such as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, about what can and cannot be released into space 

It is unlikely any bacteria would be tough enough to survive on Mars, though.

"UV radiation kills everything over a period of time anyway," said Rummel.

FMI: www.jpl.nasa.gov, www.jsc.nasa.gov, www.ksc.nasa.gov