Many articles are posing the question of whether or not this bacteria was "alien life" or of "alien origin" due to the findings of a Russian Cosmonaut, Anton Shkaplerov. The Sun's title:
RT's title:
The Independent's title:
...during spacewalks from the International Space Station under the Russian program, the cosmonauts took samples with cotton swabs from the station’s external surface. In particular, they took probes from places where the accumulation of fuel wastes were discharged during the engines’ operation or at places where the station’s surface is more obscure. After that, the samples were sent back to Earth.
Mr. Shkaplerov has assured that they should pose no danger as they are being studied on Earth. He made the statement:
And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module. 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.
Other sources such as RT state that other bacteria from Earth also collected on the ISS surface, such as bacteria from Madagascar and "plankton from the Barents Sea. It was explained that usually, these terrestrial microorganisms cling to the ship in what's called an "ionosphere lift phenomenon." The Independent stated that Roscosmos, a space agency, stated this in May about the microorganisms found:
Experiments of various years have revealed fragments of Mycobacteria DNA - a marker of heterotrophic bacterial sea plankton in the Barents Sea; the DNA of extremophile bacteria of the genius Delftria; the DNA of bacteria closely related to those found in soil samples from the island of Madagascar; vegetative genomes; the DNA of certain species of Archaea and the DNA of fungus species Erythrobasidium and Cystobasidium.
From this discovery now many in the scientific and space community are suggesting:
...Raising the upper border of the biosphere to 400 kilometers from the current altitude of 20 kilometers.
The interesting point about these microorganisms is that they are able to survive in space, which makes the foreign bacteria a fascinating target. Previous bacteria, according to TASS has undergone extreme conditions and survived according to Mr. Shkaplerov.
Some terrestrial bacteria also survived on the space station’s external surface, though they had remained within a space vacuum for three years. In addition to that, they underwent sharp swings in temperature from minus 150 to plus 150 degrees Celsius. The bacteria were brought to the space station accidentally on tablet PCs together with various materials that are placed aboard the ISS for long periods to study the materials’ behavior in outer space.
This all means that this foreign bacteria could be something new for scientists to discover. According The Independent:
Finding bacteria that came from somewhere other than Earth would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science.
The Sun stated:
Last month Sky reported that bacterial cells treated with a common antibiotic were spotted changing shape to survive while aboard the ISS.
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