MARSBUGS: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 7, Number 16, 28 April 2000. Editors: Dr. David J. Thomas, Biology and Chemistry Division, Lyon College, Batesville, AR 72503-2317, USA. dthomas@lyon.edu Dr. Julian A. Hiscox, School of Animal and Microbial Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AJ, United Kingdom. J.A.Hiscox@reading.ac.uk Marsbugs is published on a weekly to quarterly basis as warranted by the number of articles and announcements. Copyright of this compilation exists with the editors, except for specific articles, in which instance copyright exists with the author/authors. While we cannot copyright our mailing list, our readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing list. The editors do not condone "spamming" of our subscribers. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editors. E-mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting either of the editors. Article contributions are welcome, and should be submitted to either of the two editors. Contributions should include a short biographical statement about the author(s) along with the author(s)' correspondence address. Subscribers are advised to make appropriate inquiries before joining societies, ordering goods etc. Back issues and Adobe Acrobat PDF files suitable for printing may be obtained from the official Marsbugs web page at http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/marsbugs/marsbugs.html. The purpose of this newsletter is to provide a channel of information for scientists, educators and other persons interested in exobiology and related fields. This newsletter is not intended to replace peer- reviewed journals, but to supplement them. We, the editors, envision Marsbugs as a medium in which people can informally present ideas for investigation, questions about exobiology, and announcements of upcoming events. Astrobiology is still a relatively young field, and new ideas may come from the most unexpected places. Subjects may include, but are not limited to: exobiology and astrobiology (life on other planets), the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), ecopoeisis and terraformation, Earth from space, planetary biology, primordial evolution, space physiology, biological life support systems, and human habitation of space and other planets. --------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS 1) NASA INVESTIGATES HOW FUNGI MAY AFFECT FOREST TYPES/REGROWTH By John Bluck 2) TARLIKE MACRO-MOLECULES DETECTED IN "STARDUST" Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics release 3) ANALYZING NEXT TO NOTHING By G. Jeffrey Taylor 4) DON'T GET SICK ON A SPACE SHUTTLE By Rachel Nowak 5) FROSTY VIEW OF MARS SEEN IN NEW GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES JPL image advisory 6) EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY SIGNS FIRST CONTRACT FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS RESEARCH ON BOARD THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION ESA release NR07-2000 7) THREE WEEKS ON GALILEO JPL release --------------------------------------------------------------------- NASA INVESTIGATES HOW FUNGI MAY AFFECT FOREST TYPES/REGROWTH By John Bluck NASA Ames release 00-32AR 24 April 2000 Tiny fungi that make forests possible are significantly affected by clear-cutting tree stands, perhaps altering forests and plant types that re-grow, according to a recent paper in the Canadian Journal of Botany. The paper reports on ecological fungi research by NASA at Yellowstone National Park, WY, where scientists used a police technique, "DNA fingerprinting," to investigate biodiversity and the importance of human changes to ecosystems. An ecosystem is the combination of living things and raw materials, such as water, gases and minerals, that life uses in the environment. Clear-cutting refers to the practice of cutting a stand of trees in its entirety. "If the fungi in ecosystems change in large areas of the world, then the kind of plant life could also change," said Dr. Ken Cullings, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, in California's Silicon Valley, who co-authored the paper with team member Kristin Byrd. "These fungal changes in the soil may begin to explain why it is more difficult for certain species of trees to re-grow. Our results identify the need for further research to understand how fungi remained after clear-cutting," Cullings said. "The fungi we study are related to the big mushrooms you see when walking through the forests," he said. "If you go to the market, you'll also see them; they are chanterelles and king bolete, expensive mushrooms that are also mycorrhizal fungi." "Mycorrhizal fungi are important because, without them, trees could not get nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil," he said. "The fungi get carbon from tree roots in exchange for providing nitrogen and phosphorus to the trees." If a tree does not have nitrogen, it cannot survive. Most plants on Earth, including trees in the tropical rainforests, form associations with fungi. "The things we are learning in Yellowstone can apply to ecosystems across the world," said Cullings. The paper reports that the research team took soil cores at both undisturbed and clear-cut forest sites. Researchers found 48 species of ectomycorrhizal fungi in clear-cut areas, and 70 species in undisturbed Yellowstone forests. The research team also found nine of the 14 most common "clear-cut" species in the undisturbed sites, but at a much lower abundance. "We're using DNA fingerprinting to identify these different kinds of microbes," he said. "We work with a root hair the size of a pin head. Just like forensic detectives, we amplify the DNA by taking a gene, and we put it in a machine with the chemical building blocks of DNA." Scientists use an enzyme, first discovered in a Yellowstone Hot Springs bacterium in the 1960's, to make several billion copies of each gene under study. Cullings was the first scientist to use this process to categorize Yellowstone microbes. "We measure biodiversity, and one way to do it is to measure the species that are present in the soil," Cullings said. "My group is counting microorganisms and what kinds live in Yellowstone's soil. We're looking at how clear-cutting, forest fires and other disturbances are affecting the microbe populations." "We have found there is a big difference between how clear-cutting a forest affects microbes and how fires affect those populations," he said. "After a fire, or clearing of timber in a given area, the number of microbe species may be the same, but different kinds survive a fire versus survive clear-cutting." Because some types of fungi may help certain tree varieties to survive, but not others, the kind of forest in the area may change after a fire or a clear-cut. The historic cycle of forest recovery may also change. During decades or even hundreds of years, many Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain forests change from lodge pole pines, to firs and spruce. Human-made disturbances, such as acid rain and changes in atmospheric gases (including carbon dioxide levels or damage to Earth's ozone layer), can also alter the repeating cycle of tree growth, Cullings' study suggests. The Cullings paper appeared in the Canadian Journal of Botany, February 2000, Volume 78, Number 2. --------------------------------------------------------------------- TARLIKE MACRO-MOLECULES DETECTED IN "STARDUST" Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics release 26 April 2000 The first in situ chemical analysis of interstellar dust particles produces a puzzling result. These cosmic particles consist mostly of 3-dimensionally cross-linked organic macromolecules, so-called polymeric-heterocyclic-aromates. "They rather resemble tar-like substances than minerals" say Dr. Franz R. Krueger (contractor) and Dr. Jochen Kissel, Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (for extraterrestrial Physics), Garching near Munich, Germany, in the latest issue of 'Sterne und Weltraum' a monthly, German language Astronomy magazine in Heidelberg, Germany. So far, five interstellar dust particles (dust between the stars) have hit the Garching-built dust impact mass spectrometer CIDA (Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer) onboard the NASA spacecraft Stardust. Launched on February 7th 1999 Stardust will visit comet Wild-2 (pronounce Vild-2) in 2004. To reach the comet, Stardust has to perform three orbits about the sun. At the close fly-by (miss-distance 500 km/300 miles) another instrument will collect cometary dust and return it, well packed, to earth in January of 2006. During its 7-year mission, Stardust will face the stream of interstellar dust several times. This dust is part of the local environment in the Milky Way, which the solar system currently passes through at high speed. It has recently be seen by dust instruments of the Heidelberg-based Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (for Nuclear Physics) on both NASA's Galileo and ESA's Ulysses spacecrafts. The first measuring campaign for CIDA from February through December 1999 has produced the new results. During this time Stardust was at a distance of about 240 million kilometers (150 million miles) from the earth when the first impact occurred. Just before the campaign the spacecraft pointed the instrument into the direction of the interstellar dust, so that it would not measure the more frequent interplanetary dust particles, which are parts of our solar system. At an impact speed of about 30 kilometers/second (18 miles/second) these interstellar dust particles are vaporized immediately and broken up into molecular fragments. A fraction of those carries a positive or negative electronic charge. By its electric field in front of the target CIDA pulls the positive ions into the instrument to the detector. Depending on their mass it takes the ions different times to travel the 1.5 meters (5 feet) distance (heavier ions travel longer). This way they are detected mass after mass with in some 200 millionth of a second, and a mass spectrum is generated. "It is the size of these molecular fragments with nuclear masses of up to 2000 (e.g., water has 18 such units) which surprised us as much as the seemingly absence of any mineral constituents", explains Dr. Kissel of the Garching-based Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik. "Only organic molecules can reach those sizes". The largest molecules found in space so far are the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) which reach masses of a few hundred mass units. The details of the mass spectra measured with CIDA show that the molecules of the interstellar dust must have about 10% of nitrogen and/or oxygen in addition to hydrogen and carbon. This means that these cannot be pure PAHs, which are planar, but are especially due to the nitrogen extend into all three spatial directions. Such three dimensional molecules can form links to their neighbors and reach a thermal stability necessary to survive the trip into the inner solar system with 300 to 350 Kelvin (70 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit). "The organic material analyzed with CIDA in the interstellar dust particles is another type of reactive molecules which we found in the dust of comet Halley 14 years ago" says Dr. Kissel. "When they got in contact with liquid water on the young earth, they could have triggered the type of chemical reactions which are a prerequisite for the origin of life." Related web-pages: * Stardust, http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/ * CIDA, http://www.geo.fmi.fi/PLANETS/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ANALYZING NEXT TO NOTHING By G. Jeffrey Taylor From Planetary Research Discoveries 26 April 2000 Analytical techniques have advanced so far that it is possible to slice up a sample only 10 micrometers across (with a mass of only a billionth of a gram) so that a dozen microanalytical techniques can be used to extract fascinating, crucial information about the sample's history. This astonishing ability is useful in analyzing interplanetary dust collected in the stratosphere, tiny interstellar grains in meteorites, sparse and wispy weathering products in martian meteorites, and samples to be collected and returned to Earth by current and future sample return missions from comets, asteroids, martian moons, and Mars. The importance of the array of techniques available to cosmochemists has been documented by Michael Zolensky (Johnson Space Center), Carle Pieters (Brown University), Benton Clark (Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver), and James Papike (University of New Mexico), with special attention to sample-return missions. For the full story, go to http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/PSRdiscoveries/April00/analyzingSmall.htm l --------------------------------------------------------------------- DON'T GET SICK ON A SPACE SHUTTLE By Rachel Nowak From New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com 26 April 2000 An astronaut's life is already fraught with danger, but two recent studies show that attempts to help astronauts who are injured in space may put them at even greater risk. A study with monkeys suggests that emergency surgery within hours of returning to Earth could prove fatal, while an international team of anesthetists claims that medical equipment on the space shuttle for keeping an astronaut breathing in an emergency is inadequate. Only the healthiest people can become astronauts. But during lengthy spells in space, for example on the International Space Station or on a mission to Mars, serious health problems and accidents are inevitable. "Send a few more John Glenns up there and someone is going to have a [heart attack]," says Michael Todd, an anesthetist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and the editor of the journal Anesthesiology. Concerns about emergencies in space have been heightened following the joint Russian-American Bion 11 mission in 1997, in which two monkeys flew aboard the space shuttle [sic]. The monkeys were given a general anaesthetic on their first day back on Earth-something that had never been tried before. One monkey died and the other suffered serious complications. Details of what triggered the complications are being prepared for publication. "The events could be explained if there was inadequate blood flow under anesthesia, similar to that seen in a diabetic with severe nerve disorder," says Ronald Merrell of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, who chaired the Bion task force for NASA. People take at least a day to regain control of their blood flow when they return to Earth from space. If a seriously ill astronaut had to be rushed back to Earth for emergency treatment, "clinicians should be aware that there are potentially some unique anaesthetic risks involved," says William Norfleet, a space medicine expert at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. There is also plenty of scope for accidents on spacecraft, particularly fires that could release toxic fumes that stop an astronaut breathing. "Electrical fires are an ever-present hazard and there is nowhere to run," says Norfleet. To find the best way to maintain an open passage to the lungs in microgravity, a team led by Joseph Brimacombe of the University of Queensland in Cairns and Christian Keller of the University of Innsbruck built a mock-up of the living quarters on the International Space Station and submerged it in a pool to simulate microgravity. Then the team, which included four anaesthetists, tested four different techniques on manikins. They discovered that the equipment carried on the space shuttle--an endotracheal tube and a laryngoscope to insert it, similar to those commonly used on Earth--is likely to fail unless the patient is strapped down, which would take valuable time in an emergency. Inserting an endotracheal tube requires two hands and considerable force. In space, this would push an unrestrained patient out of reach. The three other techniques tested by the researchers, all of which leave the doctor with a free hand to stabilise the patient's head, worked well with or without restraints. The results will be published in the next issue of Anesthesiology. "The space shuttle definitely does not have the appropriate equipment for airway management by inexperienced personnel like astronauts," says Brimacombe. New Scientist issue: 29th April 2000 --------------------------------------------------------------------- FROSTY VIEW OF MARS SEEN IN NEW GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES JPL image advisory 27 April 2000 New images of the martian south polar cap and a crater in the Northern Hemisphere show seasonal changes taking place in each region as seen from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, currently orbiting Mars. It is summer at Mars' South Pole and the residual ice cap has shrunk to its minimal size but is still covered with carbon dioxide frost. It is winter in the North, and the rims of the Lomonosov Crater are draped with an icy frost beneath low-lying ground fog. The Global Surveyor images are available at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi- bin/PIAGenCatalogPage.pl?PIA02393, http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs or http://www.msss.com. Mars Global Surveyor is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. --------------------------------------------------------------------- EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY SIGNS FIRST CONTRACT FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS RESEARCH ON BOARD THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION ESA release NR07-2000 28 April 2000 On 3 May 2000, the European Space Agency and researchers from academia and industry in Germany, Italy and Switzerland will sign a contract for a health research project which will lay the scientific and industrial foundations for the development of a space bioreactor for biomedical applications to be set up on the International Space Station. As Jörg Feustel-Büechl, ESA's Director of Manned Spaceflight and Microgravity points out: "This is the first in a series of over fifty contracts that ESA will sign in the coming years for application-oriented research projects that involve use of the International Space Station in the development of which Europe is participating, together with the USA, Russia, Japan and Canada." A bioreactor is a cultivation vessel used in research laboratories and industrial production to grow bacteria, yeast or animal cells and, increasingly in the recent past, tissues. The one to be developed under this contract will be designed specifically for mammalian cell cultivation and will be used on the International Space Station to study the cultivation of medically relevant cells, tissues and organ-like structures, with particular emphasis on vessels and cartilage. Millions of people every year suffer organ and tissue damage from diseases and accidents. Transplantation of tissues and organs from other human bodies is severely restricted by the limited availability of donors. Taking tissue samples from unaffected areas of a patient's own body, growing them in vitro, outside the patient's body, to a size and structure suitable for re-implantation into the body parts affected by organ or tissue damage is therefore seen as a promising alternative to the transplantation of foreign tissues and organs. Re-implantation also eliminates the fundamental problem of rejection of foreign tissues and organs by the patient's system. Growing tissue samples in vitro, i.e. in a bioreactor, is currently one of the major goals of medical research. One of the possible applications of this technique is mass cultivation of biological implants to regenerate the meniscus and the articular cartilage of the knee. Cartilage regeneration is urgently needed by patients in their 20's to 50's, many of them with injuries from sports accidents. Demand for such implants in Europe alone is estimated at 100 000 cases a year. The principles of in vitro cell culture have been known for almost 100 years, but only in the last 10-20 years has the cultivation of mammalian cultures increased significantly, leading to the creation of the discipline of tissue engineering. These techniques are expected to revolutionize biomedical and surgical procedures in the near future. Space research has potential to give a boost to tissue engineering. As compared to the normal gravity conditions on Earth, a weightlessness environment may provide much better conditions for obtaining proper three-dimensional cell structures. Over the past decade, evidence in the scientific literature has indicated that weightlessness (also known as "microgravity" in the scientific world) may become a surprising, unconventional and yet attractive medium for the generation of macroscopic tissue equivalents for a variety of basic and applied medical purposes. The modular space bioreactor for growing medically relevant organ- like structures proposed by a European scientific and industrial research team under the coordination of Professor Augusto Cogoli from the Swiss Federal Technical University (ETH) in Zurich will play an essential part in clarifying cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for cell aggregation and differentiation control mechanisms and also in obtaining better pseudo-organs for possible clinical uses. Professor Cogoli's team comprises members from Switzerland, Italy and Germany: Dr. Isabelle Walther from the Swiss Federal Technical University (ETH), Zurich (CH), Dr. Werner Müller from the Sulzer Medica company in Winterthur (CH), Professor Saverio Ambesi- Impiombato from the University of Udine (I), Dr. Augustinus Bader from the Medical University of Hannover (D), Professor Peter Bruckner from the University of Münster (D) and Dr. Ralf Pörtner from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (D). The modular space bioreactor project is one of over 50 microgravity applications projects for the International Space Station that the European Space Agency expects to initiate in the near future. The aim of these projects is to use the International Space Station as a vehicle for application-oriented scientific and industrial research to obtain data in space that will be needed for digital simulation on Earth or to give more insight into Earth-based industrial processes. With the availability of the International Space Station, examining specific applied research questions in the unique environment of weightlessness promises to be a rewarding long-term undertaking for industry. This project is being sponsored by ESA's Microgravity Applications Promotion Programme and is being funded jointly with the participating scientific research institutes and industry. A major aspect of this program is the setting-up of Europe-wide teams and networks involving partners from academia and industry working together on industrially relevant research. The aim is to initiate concrete industrial projects in which terrestrial research with industrial objectives and commercial funding, with the participation of researchers from scientific institutes, will be supported by ESA, including the sponsoring of space flight opportunities and associated ground-based activities. Professor Cogoli and his scientific-industrial team proposed the modular space bioreactor project in response to ESA's first Announcement of Opportunity for Physical Sciences and Biotechnology, issued in 1998 to invite scientists to submit research proposals for the International Space Station. ESA received 145 proposals in response to this announcement, a number for exceeding expectations. In a review of the proposals by independent peers, 6 were rated "outstanding", 26 were "highly recommended" and 30 were "recommended". Of these proposals, 31 dealt with application- oriented research, including thermophysical properties of liquid metals, advanced foams, biological tissue culturing, osteoporosis and combustion processes. The peer review panel summarized its evaluation of the proposal made by Professor Cogoli and his team in the following words: "The proposal for producing cartilage without using any scaffold structure is an outstanding and innovative approach. Because of the extremely high content of exopolymeric material in cartilage this may be the only way for in vitro production of a functional cartilage analogue. This approach cannot be done except under microgravity conditions. Only microgravity conditions will allow an appropriate cell contact that is stable in position while loose in cohesiveness." --------------------------------------------------------------------- THREE WEEKS ON GALILEO JPL release 24 April - 14 May 2000 The first of the next three weeks sees the continued return of science data stored on the spacecraft's onboard tape recorder. In the second and third weeks, the orbital motion of the Earth and Jupiter brings the Sun between the two, creating radio interference and making reliable communications between the spacecraft and Earth impossible. The Sun's effect on Galileo's radio signal gradually increases as the spacecraft moves behind the Sun, and then gradually decreases as the spacecraft emerges from behind the Sun. This geometric situation is known as superior solar conjuction. The spacecraft will emerge just in time to prepare for a close flyby of Ganymede on May 20. During the week of April 24th, playback is interrupted twice. On Tuesday, April 25 playback is halted to allow the spacecraft to perform a small turn to keep its antenna pointed toward Earth. On Thursday, April 27, playback is interrupted again to perform standard maintenance on the spacecraft's propulsion system. On Friday, April 28 playback is terminated for the duration of the solar conjunction. Prior to the loss of reliable communications, Galileo returns three observations acquired during its February flyby of Io. The observations are returned by the Photopolarimeter Radiometer (PPR), the Solid-State Imaging camera (SSI), and the Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS). PPR returns a dayside thermal map of Io. The map is designed to provide information on the thermal properties of Io's surface in the presence of sunlight. NIMS and SSI complete the playback plans by returning additional independent views of Io. Come back in a few weeks for the return of This Week on Galileo, when you'll be able to read all about Galileo's next exciting encounter! For more information on the Galileo spacecraft and its mission to Jupiter, please visit the Galileo home page at one of the following URL's: http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo --------------------------------------------------------------------- End Marsbugs, Volume 7, Number 16.