New Bacterial Life-Form Discovered in NASA and ESA Spacecraft Clean Rooms

Wouldn't bacteria possibly pose the same issue as dust to the telescope.

I used my Internet superpowers to Google "clean room use for orbital telescopes" and came up with this: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1897/why-was-the-hu...

It's probably a combination of general cleanliness and a desire to avoid mildew (one spore + humidity = army of spores).

I worked IT for JPL's Cleanroom Group a few years ago. Biological contaminants are only one factor. 95-99% of the cleanrooms they have are not much cleaner than something like a typical elementary classroom with a well kept air filtration system (not great). These are Class 100K rooms [1]. Less than 100K particles of 0.1 um size or bigger per m^3 of air (dust, hair, skin, anything really). Offenders of contaminating the rooms some brought in unapproved or contaminated materials, like non-cleanroom notepads or gaseous/non-cleanroom markers/pens, cardboard. The reason why the rooms were not operated cleaner is because of their size. Some were large like 40m by 40m by 40m (the main Spacecraft Assembly Facility where the Herschel instrument saw final assembly), others housed special capabilities like the 25-foot Space Simulator [2], shakers and bakers (rotation/vibration test pedestals, and space vacuum hot/cold chambers), or isolation pads (pedestals mounted on ultra heavy 40'x40'x40' blocks of concrete to reduce vibration for optics instrument testing). It was also common practice to certify a room at one level, and operate it like it was the next higher level with minimal cost and maximal benefit. Things like additional air exchanges, daily or twice daily cleanings (instead of weekly), extra HEPA filters, stricter ESD operations, stricter temperature and humidity control (ESD & Planetary Protection reasons). This was often more than sufficient to appease the Principal Investigators, Instrument Designers, and Planetary Protection.

Many rooms were Class 10K capable. A few were Class 1K or Class 100 capable. But those were very small rooms, sometimes even 10'x10'x10' tents setup in a one level less capable room. Only two rooms operated were even capable of operating at Class 100, IIRC, and only did so when necessary. There were apart of chip fabrication building.

To answer your question, Herschel has its base requirements similar to anything we send off into space, and then it had it optics instruments requirements. Projects have been ruined when instruments do not work or do not work as well as designed because of dust, ESD, or a hair particle. It's really hard/expensive to wipe your lens with a microfiber cloth in space; JPL once did a study to determine the cost/feasibility. It dwarfed the original project.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom#ISO_14644-1_cleanroom...

[2] http://www.universetoday.com/97249/jpls-torture-chamber-for-...

The article's second page answers this:

Scientists go to all this trouble for the purpose of “planetary protection”—which usually means protecting other planets from contamination by microbes originating on Earth. Most spacefaring countries have agreed to follow guidelines from the International Council for Science’s Committee on Space Research to reduce the chances of their vehicles carrying Earth organisms to other planets. The clean room procedures also safeguard against scientists mistaking Earthly microbes as extraterrestrial in origin if they are discovered on another planet, having caught a ride with a man-made spacecraft. “The whole idea of collecting information about what kind of bugs we have in the spacecraft assembly facility is to have baseline information so that in the future, if you find it on Mars, you have some grounds to rule out the possibility that it came from Mars,” Vaishampayan says.

It's partially so that if we do in fact discover life in space, we're not "discovering" something that we actually brought up there with us.

Planetary protection protocols.

It's a best effort approach to minimize the risk of "contaminating" planets with Earth life. It applies to any spacecraft in interplanetary space, not just landers, because it's impossible to predict where an object that ends up in heliocentric orbit will end up, it could end up hitting another asteroid, planet, or moon.

It doesn't want to live in dirty rooms, only in clean rooms.

Presumably it did not spring into existence fully-formed in a clean room in the last hundred years. So, it must be able to live in other conditions but at population levels that are virtually undetectable.

Maybe it's very vulnerable to competition, predators etc.

That's the mind-blowing thing for me about this article. The idea is that it can't compete with other organisms out in the wild. Out in the wild, other organisms reproduce too quickly, are too aggressive, devour these bacteria, etc. But these bacteria have something that allows them to survive in a clean room's extreme environment, something that kills off other more competitive organisms. This is the very definition of niche.

It is possible for it to have evolved in the last few decades, but really unlikely. The stated figure of less than 5% DNA commonality implies a really extensive divergence. Given the low energy environment it grows it, the bacteria likely reproduces at a very slow rate, making the divergence over the last few decades very unlikely.

That said, its probable that the strains discovered are probably some slight "modification" from the "wildtype" bacteria.

As for what they eat in a clean room, there are a couple options. A) They might be driven mostly by alcohol metabolism and feeding off residual alcohol from the containimation. Or might likely B) they're feeding off the skin flakes coming off the "unshielded" areas of the workers, and that they are just very very slow.

It's likely a new kind of bacteria, because of the genetic difference. But that doesn't mean it hasn't made any additional adaptions for living in clean rooms specifically. Maybe it started out as a bacteria that could survive in an environment like that but has become even better at it since.

Though the hostile environment of a clean room would keep population size relatively low and keep them from reproducing too often, compared to bacteria in normal conditions. So their evolution would be slower.

It's only 96% similar to other bacteria we know of. Which is greater than the difference of most mammals to each other. But still pretty similar and not entirely radical in its genetic makeup (in the grand scheme of things).

Discovering new niches in which life survives gives us more possible extraterrestrial habitats that could, potentially, also harbor life.