From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Thu Jan 02 1997 - 15:19:04 MST
>> No, I recall that one of the Apollo expeditions retrieved parts
>>of one of the earlier probes, and found viable spores and
>>encysted bacteria inside it after several years of exposure to
>>the moon environment.
>NASA had a policy to sterilize everything sent into space, so we
>would 1) not confuse _our own_ contamination for new life and
>2) we would not grow our our bacteria, yeasts, molds, in new
>places. So much for _that_ theory.
Davin,
The earlier poster remembers correctly, I read about this too.
Apollo 12 visited the landing site of Surveyor 3, and numerous
parts of the spacecraft were returned to earth. As I recall inside
a camera lens a spore was found that when placed in a suitable
growing media was once again viable.
The NASA report on the returned materials is NASA SP-284, which is
unfortunately not available on the WWW.
I do not know if the NASA policy about sterilization was in place
at the time of the Surveyor launch.
Brian
Extropian
Cypherpunk
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