High atop a platform inside a clean room at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) launch site in South America, scientists painstakingly searched for microbes near the Ariane 5 rocket due to launch the Herschel space telescope in May 2009. Only very unusual organisms can survive the repeated sterilization procedures in clean rooms, not to mention the severe lack of nutrients available. But the scientists’ careful inspection was fruitful, turning up a type of bacteria that had never been seen before.
Two years later this same bug surfaced 4,000 kilometers away in the clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida where engineers were preparing the Mars lander Phoenix for launch. Afterward the teams behind the two discoveries joined forces to analyze the bacterium, and found it was so different from known organisms that it constituted not just a new species, but a new genus, which they described in a paper published in July in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. “This is the first report of bugs isolated in two different clean rooms, and nowhere else,” says Parag Vaishampayan, a microbiologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the team behind the Kennedy Space Center detection.
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