Workshop on Planetary Protection Knowledge Gaps for Human Extraterrestrial Missions (Reverse Contamination)

This is the third of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here. I mentioned, in my last post on forward contamination, that reverse contamination is the primary concern for Planetary Protection (PP). In this context, reverse contamination refers to the transport of Martian …

Workshop on Planetary Protection Knowledge Gaps for Human Extraterrestrial Missions (Intro)

reposted from jennomics.com http://www.nasa.gov/ames/events/ppw2015workshop/#.VRMLLJPF8mU I’m at a NASA Ames workshop this week. The goal is to have a discussion about planetary protection with respect to human spaceflight, in particular to Mars, mostly during a “sample and return” mission and a little bit about human habitation on Mars. I’m tweeting with #planetaryprotection. There’s also live streaming here: …

And the winners of the #spacemicrobes Microbial Playoffs are…

NOTE (3-12-15):  THESE RESULTS ARE INCORRECT.   We have left them here for comparison.   A blog post describing the problem is here and the correct information can be found here. We’ve finished analyzing all the data from the “Microbial Playoffs” part of Project MERCCURI (described here).   Each microbe that was chosen to fly to the International …

Update on Project MERCCURI a.k.a. #spacemicrobes

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 …

Planning some space travel? Don’t forget your microbes

For many years I have been worried about how space travel will affect microbiomes – of the space vehicles and of the residents (people, other animals, plants, etc).  This is one of the reasons we started Project MERCCURI and get involved in looking at the microbes on the International Space Station.  It is also why …

Nice series of papers on microbial ecology and space travel

Well, here is another benefit of automated Google Scholar searches. I think it is unlikely I would have found these new papers without such searches but these are fascinating and directly relevant to many aspects of work we are doing on Project MERCCURI.  A series of papers on microbial ecolog and space travel in the …

The 11.4 million mile swab kit

I’m proud to announce that the sample collection for the building science component of Project MERCCURI is complete! In early May, Koichi Wakata from JAXA (Japan’s space exploration agency) collected swabs swabs of surfaces aboard the International Space Station. Back in June last year, Jenna, Wendy and I went to the Johnson Space Center in …