Bacteria as little helpers in space – Diepresse.com

At the beginning of August 2019, a small container full of ground bacteria came – Sphingomonas desiccabilis -On the international space station, there, the astro biologist and Esa astronaut Luca Parmitano received him, provided the bacteria with nutrient solution and a piece of basalt from Iceland. They do not spurn it at least on Earth either, they get metals from rocks, also in large-scale mining (« organic mining »), including vanadium and rare earths, highly in demand for green techniques. It should be clarified whether the bacteria do this under conditions of weightlessness, and whether they do this under that of the gravitation simulated by means of a centrifugs on Mars. There they should be used as assistants in mining.

S. Dessicabilis made it (Nature Communications 11: 5523), it is unclear whether the bacterium will also make it with the rock that passes on the delicacies – Regolith – and on which the attention of all those who want to make Mars want to make Mars habitable: You cannot transport everything there, so the rock there – with bacterial aid – deliver everything it takes: materials and dietary, food and breath: Not atmosphere of Mars, it consists of 96 percent CO_2. This could be used by cyanobacteria that operate photosynthesis and emit oxygen as a waste.

Bacteria are supposed to bring air to breathe and drinking water in Mars

But they don’t just live from Co₂ And light, you also need metals such as manganese and iron, which are in the regolith, but it is stressed with poisons, perchlorates above all. They would have to be neutralized, this also applies to the water that exists on Mars -as ice cream on the poles and in the soil -which is also heavily loaded.

You could possibly detoxify with a different bacterium, Pseduomonas StutzerI, which is used on Earth Perchlorate – which is used as a rocket fuel and contaminated the environment regionally – and thus defused (Journal of Applied Genetics 49, p. 425). Adam Arkin in 2017 wanted to find out whether this would also do so under Mars conditions. In collaboration with NASA, he operates an idea tank for the use of bacteria in the universe for the Center for Utilization of Biological Enegineering in Space (such as Interface 12: 20140715, Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences 2021.711550), of which you can hardly hear or read anything later ..