The existence of life on other planets, especially Mars, is a question pondered in literature, movies and imaginations.
Wichita State University’s Dr. Mark Schneegurt is working on that issue with the assistance of a $377,000 grant from NASA to examine the toughness of microbes isolated from spacecraft assembly facilities.
“It changes everything if we find living systems on these planets,” said Schneegurt, professor of biological sciences in WSU’s Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “We talk about the ‘microphone moment.’ Who’s going to get up at that microphone and say, ‘We have evidence of life in another world’? You want to be sure about it.”
The grant will allow Schneegurt and his team to study microbes likely to be carried by spaceships that are capable of living “on cold arid worlds and in the pressurized brines of ocean worlds” in outer space.
While the spacecraft are assembled in clean rooms, Schneegurt said, it is unrealistic to expect no microorganisms to exist on a spacecraft. Knowing that, the job of the Wichita State team is to evaluate which microbes might survive the trip to Mars and the environment of Mars.
Schneegurt and his team are focusing on the wet environments of Mars that contain salt brine and evaporite minerals that might provide a habitable environment. While investigating what types of life on Earth might survive on Mars, researchers also learn about possible types of life on Mars.