The end of a scientific journey -- started five years ago in a frozen
tunnel deep below the Alaska tundra -- came in January for NASA astrobiologist
Dr. Richard Hoover.
It proved a long, arduous journey for Hoover and his colleagues to complete the process of identifying a unique new life form. For the life form itself, a new bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium, the journey to discovery took much longer -- some 32,000 years. The bacterium -- the first fully described, validated species ever found alive in ancient ice -- is NASA’s latest discovery of an "extremophile." Extremophiles are hardy life forms that exist and flourish in conditions hostile to most known organisms, from the potentially toxic chemical levels of salt-choked lakes and alkaline deserts to the extreme heat of deep-sea volcanoes. NASA and its partner organizations study the potential for life in such extreme zones to help prepare robotic probes and, eventually, human explorers to search other worlds for signs of life. This search is a key element of the Vision for Space Exploration, the ambitious effort to return Americans to the Moon and to conduct robotic and human exploration of Mars and other worlds in our Solar System, which might conceal life forms unimaginable to us -- thriving in conditions few Earth species could tolerate. | ||||
