Rare Microbe Found in two Very Distant Spacecraft Clean Rooms

NASA researchers have identified a rare microbe in spacecraft clean rooms located in Florida and South America.

Such rooms are among the most lifeless spaces on Earth, with fewer microbes residing there than almost anywhere else on the planet. Constant surveys, nonetheless, are conducted in order to identify what could potentially become a stowaway on space-bound probes or vehicles. Should life ever be identified outside of the planet, scientists could easily check it against a list of just a few hundred microbes that have been detected in these rooms.

Besides dramatically limiting the number of microbes that are able to survive within these places, the processes used within them select for microbes able to withstand a wide range of stresses, including chemical cleaning and ultraviolet treatments. These are the same microbes, however, that also tend to be resistant to spacecraft sterilization techniques, such as heating and peroxide treatment.

"We want to have a better understanding of these bugs, because the capabilities that adapt them for surviving in clean rooms might also let them survive on a spacecraft," said microbiologist Parag Vaishampayan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the paper about the microbe. "This particular bug survives with almost no nutrients."

The new bacterium is named Tersicoccus phoenicis -- tersi come from the Latin word for clean, coccus the Greek word for berry due to its shape, and pheonicis after NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, which was being prepared for launch when it was first collected.

That a global database did not reveal any other location for the strain of bacteria was not surprising to Vaishampayan.

"We find a lot of bugs in clean rooms because we are looking so hard to find them there," he said. "The same bug might be in the soil outside the clean room but we wouldn't necessarily identify it there because it would be hidden by the overwhelming numbers of other bugs."