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Cosmonaut Claims to Have Found Extraterrestrial Bacteria on the Exterior of the ISS

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the space-boogers dept.

takyon writes:

Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov suspects an extraterrestrial origin for bacteria found on the exterior of the ISS:

A Russian cosmonaut claims to have caught aliens. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov says he found bacteria clinging to the external surface of the International Space Station that didn't come from the surface of Earth.

Shkaplerov told the Russian news agency that cosmonauts collected the bacteria by swabbing the outside of the space station during space walks years ago.

"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module," Shkapkerov told TASS. "That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far and it seems that they pose no danger."

A recent study suggests that interplanetary dust can transport microbes to or from Earth:

Astronomers have long believed that asteroid (or comet) impacts were the only natural way to transport life between planets. However, a new study published November 6 in Astrobiology suggests otherwise.

The study, authored by Professor Arjun Berera from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, suggests that life on Earth may have begun when fast-moving streams of space dust carried microscopic organisms to our planet. Berera found that these streams of interplanetary dust are not only capable of transporting particles to Earth, but also from it.

Also at TASS, Newsweek, BGR.

Space Dust Collisions as a Planetary Escape Mechanism (DOI: 10.1089/ast.2017.1662) (DX) (arXiv link above)

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:02AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:02AM (#603291) Journal

    There was a race to reach the moon with a manned landing, and the USSR failed there. The U.S. may have had a PR victory in the space race "battle", but it was earned. Since then, what we've done with unmanned probes and space telescopes has been far more interesting. Great exploration of Pluto, Ceres, Saturn, etc. And the science that has come out of Hubble [wikipedia.org] and Kepler [wikipedia.org] is just overwhelming. We pretty much dominate these types of missions, although ESA [wikipedia.org] is becoming more prominent.

    Obviously, if China were to beat the U.S. to a manned Mars landing, we would be taking a huge L and the world would see it as another sign of the end of American dominance. A SpaceX manned landing would be acceptable but would be taken as a sign of increasing commercial importance of space activity. Or of Musky vanity.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:13AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:13AM (#603326)

    US espionage of Soviet designs may also have been a factor. I have always been curious if the US actually copied any of the technology:

    https://www.popsci.com/cias-bold-kidnapping-soviet-spacecraft [popsci.com]

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:20AM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:20AM (#603330) Journal

      Slate link [slate.com] I posted has this:

      Unsurprisingly, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 sent the space program into a freefall. Manpower fled, and infrastructure began to crumble. But the Russians kept their strong foothold in spaceflight by entering into a multinational agreement (led mainly by the U.S.) to build a new giant outpost in orbit, the International Space Station, motivated partly to keep Russian space companies from going under. Whereas competition was the flavor of the Cold War, cooperation was the new motto in the 1990s. As part of this joint effort, the Russians agreed to provide key hardware for the ISS, including building and launching the core modules of the station and offering their venerable Soyuz taxi ships to carry crews to and from the outpost. They also sold their spacefaring expertise on the international market, most notably offering to rocket foreign telecommunications satellites into orbit at a time where few could do so, or at least do so cheaply and efficiently. This, alongside the ISS ferrying service, continued to be a hallmark of the program. Just last year they launched a whole spectrum of satellites for European clients, plus the usual assortment of domestic Russian scientific and military satellites.

      Maybe that could be interpreted as NASA sucking up any Russian space station innovations that may have existed during the development of the ISS. Which we'll be applying in the future if we put stations around the Moon or Mars.

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