[meteorite-list] Mars life concerns

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Jul 18 17:41:14 2005
Message-ID: <200507182140.j6ILeP704070_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

> Don't forget the Apollo mission that recovered the camera from the austere
> Surveyor 3 lander,
> after a tough trip and more than 2.5 year vacation on the Moon, in vacuum,
> without any food or water, surviving the conditions of transit and all the
> radiation thrown at them. Perhaps they didn't reproduce, but the _Streptococcus
> mitas_ bacteria were sure virulent when they were cultured back on earth by
> the US Center for Disease Control.
>
> In Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad's words:
> "I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the
> whole...Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said
> [anything] about it."
>

Leonard D. Jaffe, Surveyor project scientist and custodian of the Surveyor 3
parts brought back from the moon, has stated that there's a good chance
the microorganisms found on the Surveyor 3 camera have never been to the
Moon.

Jaffe wrote to the Planetary Society that according to a report from
somebody on his staff who had witnessed the biological test which
gave positive results, a "breach of sterile procedure" took place at
just the right time to produce a false positive result.

One of the implements being used to scrape samples off the Surveyor parts
was laid down on a non-sterile laboratory bench, and then was used to
collect surface samples for culturing. It was that sample set which
showed the presence of the germs, a common human infectuous bacteria.

Dr. Jaffe: "It is, therefore, quite possible that the
microorganisms were transferred to the camera after its return to Earth,
and that they had never been to the Moon. The test, of course, could
only be performed once, and the parts were subsequently taken out of
quarantine and fully re-exposed to terrestrial conditions, so we'll
never know for sure. But it looks suspiciously like a lab error
rather than a lunar germ colony."

So concludes, Leonard D. Jaffe, Surveyor project scientist and
custodian of the Surveyor 3 parts.

Ron Baalke
Received on Mon 18 Jul 2005 05:40:25 PM PDT