extremophiles

The Problems of Contaminating Mars with Earth’s Microorganisms

Rodrigo Abans shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. There has been much concern about whether humankind is taking enough care in space exploration. There are a plethora of ethical issues. One of these concerns is the fact that anything that goes offworld carries a certain amount of dormant microorganisms. This led to the decision of destroying the Juno spacecraft by crashing it into Jupiter instead of risking an accidental crash […]

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Atacama Research Featured in HuffPo

Dr. Armando Azua-Bustos was recently featured in a Huffington Post article on the extreme limits of life in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Dr. Azua-Bustos discusses his team’s recent discovery of bacterial species at María Elena South, a location previously thought too dry to sustain life. The researchers are now investigating whether any such “dry limit” for life exists on Earth at all, and they are continuing to search for habitable environments with even less available water than at María Elena South. […]

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NPP Newsletter Features Rika Anderson

The quarterly newsletter of the NASA Postdoctoral Program features our own Dr. Rika Anderson in a “First Impressions” article about her NPP fellowship. Her time as a fellow of the NASA Astrobiology Institute will be split across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the University of Washington, and Yellowstone National Park–all in pursuit of studying Archaea and their highly-evolved suitability to extreme environments. [Read the article in the NASA NPP newsletter]

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Podcast: Finding life at the driest place on Earth

Our “Beer with BMSIS” podcast for November features a conversation with BMSIS research scientist Armando Azua-Bustos about his research goal of Finding life at the driest place on Earth. The “astrobiologist from the desert”, Dr. Azua-Bustos leads a conversation about the various forms of exotic life that exist–and might yet be found–in the dry deserts of the world. Focusing his research on the environment of the Atacama desert in Chile, Dr. Azua-Bustos explains the strategies he uses to search for […]

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