Some of Washington state's smallest residents will blast off into space Thursday afternoon.
Eight species of bacteria will be taken, in Washington soil, to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX craft. The soil is from a scientific field in Prosser, Benton County, run by Washington State University. Scientists will study how microgravity affects the bacteria and how soil microbial communities function in space.
That information is key to growing food in space or on another celestial body, project researchers said.
The eight bacteria are Dyadobacter, Ensifer, Neorhizobium, Rhodococcus, Sinorhizobium, Sphingopyxis, Streptomyces and Variovorax. The soil housing the bacteria will contain chitin, a common microbe chow found in soil worldwide.
The ability to eat chitin, or eat byproducts given off by other species as they break down chitin, is key for the microbial community to survive, according to NASA.
The experiment, called Dynamics of the Microbiome in Space (DynaMoS) is funded by NASA and being conducted by researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
"We still have a lot to learn about how microorganisms behave on Earth," said Janet Jansson, a chief scientist and laboratory fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the leader of DynaMoS, in a NASA news release. "There are even more questions to address if we are to grow food in space, for instance on the lunar surface or for a long-lasting mission to Mars. How do microbes behave in microgravity, for instance?"
Jansson, Ryan McClure and other PNNL scientists have spent several years exploring how communities of microorganisms behave in Earth's soil.
Understanding how microbes interact as they provide nutrients and protect plants "is the first step for building communities of microbes that can support plant growth in places like the moon, Mars, or the space station," McClure said.
The cargo resupply services mission (SpaceX CRS-25) is slated to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5:44 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. You can watch the launch at nasa.gov/nasalive.
Other experiments on board include studies of the immune system, wound healing, soil communities and cell-free biomarkers, along with mapping the composition of Earth's dust and testing an alternative to concrete.
The experiment will include 104 test tubes filled with the soil and microbes. Half will be sent to the space station and half will grow under similar conditions (besides gravity and atmosphere) in a laboratory at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Each tube will contain 20 grams of soil packed with chitin and hundreds of millions of each of the eight bacteria. The tubes will be sampled at four times over 12 weeks. Then the space samples will be returned to Kennedy Space Center, and the samples and microbes will be moved from Kennedy to PNNL for analysis.
