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Rovers are assembled in a clean room and space doesn't sterilize all life. It is impossible to know with certainty that a rover is sterile. Even autoclaving t
by tastyfreeze 3y ago
Rovers are assembled in a clean room and space doesn't sterilize all life. It is impossible to know with certainty that a rover is sterile. Even autoclaving the whole rover doesn't guarantee sterility.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-bunch-of-earth-organisms-were-stuck-outside-the-iss-and-survived https://www.sciencealert.com/a-bunch-of-earth-organisms-were...
- asdff 3y agoThere has to be some limit on radiation resistance for these microorganisms. At the end of the day, DNA is a fragile molecule and it can be degraded. Maybe the rover could be overbombarded with radiation on this journey, if the background radiation in space is insufficient.
- tastyfreeze 3y agoWe have found life in every environment we have explored on Earth. That includes surviving high radiation environments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
- asdff 3y agoRadiodurans probably still has some limit where the rate of radiation is higher than its ability to repair fragmented DNA, at which point things snowball and the DNA is quickly broken down to its constituent bases and there would be no template at all in which to initiate any repair.