Cosmonaut Conan is going on a return-trip to Phobos, potato-shaped moon of the red planet, Mars. However, this Conan is not the mighty warrior of Robert E Howard fame (see the 1934 Weird Tales jacket above, which featured an early Conan the Barbarian story), instead, it’s a tiny microbe, nicknamed Conan the bacterium.
Conan won’t be alone on the trip; also on board the Russian-Chinese spacecraft will be other samples, including yeast and cress, all packed inside a packed in a small titanium biocontainer (see diagram). These micronauts are part of the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE) supplied by the US Planetary Society, to see if organisms like this can survive space conditions over a five-year period. If they are returned to Earth alive and kicking, they will supply useful information that may boost the Transpermia theory. This proposes that simple forms of life can be carried across space from planet to planet, and indeed that life on Earth may have originated with such life forms, splashed off Mars billennia ago, in a mighty cosmic meteor collision.
The idea of surviving in space seems unlikely, yet simple life forms on Earth manage to live in seemingly deadly environments - boiling water, acid springs, nuclear reactors, deep water vents are just a few such places. Whether microbes can survive half a decade in space is another question; with luck we’ll have an answer if the probe returns safely. As planned, Conan and his micronaut team, plus samples of Phobos soil, will be returned to Earth in 2012.
Visit the Planetary Society here, and Conan products at Amazon, here.
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