[meteorite-list] Mars life concerns

[Ron Baalke]

> Don't forget the Apollo mission that recovered the camera from the austere  
> Surveyor 3 lander, 
> after a tough trip and more than 2.5 year vacation on the Moon, in vacuum,  
> without any food or water, surviving the conditions of transit and all the  
> radiation thrown at them.  Perhaps they didn't reproduce, but the  _Streptococcus 
> mitas_ bacteria were sure virulent when they were cultured back  on earth by 
> the US Center for Disease Control.
>  
> In Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad's words:
> "I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the  
> whole...Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever  said 
> [anything] about it."
>  

Leonard D. Jaffe, Surveyor project scientist and custodian of the Surveyor 3 
parts brought back from the moon, has stated that there's a good chance 
the microorganisms found on the Surveyor 3 camera have never been to the 
Moon.

Jaffe wrote to the Planetary Society that according to a report from 
somebody on his staff who had witnessed the biological test which 
gave positive results, a "breach of sterile procedure" took place at 
just the right time to produce a false positive result.

One of the implements being used to scrape samples off the Surveyor parts 
was laid down on a non-sterile laboratory bench, and then was used to 
collect surface samples for culturing. It was that sample set which 
showed the presence of the germs, a common human infectuous bacteria.

Dr. Jaffe: "It is, therefore, quite possible that the 
microorganisms were transferred to the camera after its return to Earth, 
and that they had never been to the Moon. The test, of course, could 
only be performed once, and the parts were subsequently taken out of 
quarantine and fully re-exposed to terrestrial conditions, so we'll 
never know for sure. But it looks suspiciously like a lab error 
rather than a lunar germ colony."

So concludes, Leonard D. Jaffe, Surveyor project scientist and
custodian of the Surveyor 3 parts.

Ron Baalke