COULD hardy Earth microbes stow away on NASA’s Phoenix lander and colonise the Martian surface? That’s the possibility raised by a team who took a census of life in the lander’s assembly room before it launched last August.
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found at least 26,000 cells per square metre and 100 species of bacteria in the room. Some of those bacteria can tolerate heat, cold and salt. One particularly resilient bug called Bacillus pumilus can withstand doses of UV light that kill most other life. “This is the hardiest organism we have…
