After 9 months of technical delays, during which time our collection of frozen built environment microbes went around the earth every 90 minutes, we are finally getting growth data from the International Space Station (ISS)! Astronaut Terry Virts has been taking daily growth readings of our collection of 48 microbes and today (Friday) is the last day of data collection. Meanwhile here on earth, I’ve been collecting data from the control plates. Hopefully within the next week we’ll have an idea of which microbes survived the delay and more excitingly if any of them behave differently in microgravity than on earth. Updates and data will be posted here. For more information on Project MERCCURI, check out our website.
For a little teaser, here’s a short video piece that NASA released today which talks about the project on the ISS. For more media coverage of the project, check out our “Press” page.