"OSIRIS Strain" landing at a lab near you! 🐛
NASA recovers potential ancient extraterrestrial microbes from asteroid Bennu
Good night for an “Andromeda Strain” viewing party!
When I was approximately the age of many of Spielberg’s leading actors, in approximately the same time frame, tweens living dangerously, encountering bizarre & unbelievable lifeforms, “The Andromeda Strain” was released, first as a book in 1969, then the film in 1971. This film impacted my outlook & aspirations like many young minds of my generation, many future scientists now working at NASA.
Today marks an historic event, taking 7 years of technological magic to return the sample dust & debris from asteroid Bennu, back here to the American desert. When Michael Crichton released the Andromeda Strain, many folks thought it must be based on a true story, the science was so detailed & realistic. He didn’t dissuade this notion, since he realized the impact the story was having on society. The samples from Bennu will be kept & processed in similar facilities & handled in similar “glove-boxes” with similar risks.
The story has also been termed “government fiction,” like science fiction, but involving kafkaesque bureaucracy, like “Dr. Strangelove.” It also poses a warning to us as we are embroiled in whistleblowing regarding “extraterrestrial lifeforms” that nature abounds in the law of unintended consequences. The virus turns out to not be “alive” as we know it, but a crystalline form that mutates rapidly, not unlike COVID. Once it begins eating the rubber & plastic, the safety seals are compromised & well, you have to watch….
The story was also expanded in 2010 with a miniseries, in which the andromeda strain also is shown to be stimulated by radiation, so a nuclear solution is out of the question.
I’m a firm believer in “panspermia” in a universe filled with extremophiles all the way from the highest clouds to miles below the Earth’s surface. Look at an encyclopedia of various mushrooms around the world: there you will find amazing spores that probably sprouted here millions of years ago. To dive even deeper, listen to Terence McKenna or read his books. In his first book, he gives cosmic details, dictated from the psilocybe mushroom itself, about using dna & spores to send telepathic-enhancing intelligence across the galaxy.
Terence’s Oracle playlist: click here!
The extraterrestrial asteroid-dust has landed! OSIRIS REX success
ATTN NASA: suggest astrobio sampling w/micro-inoculation of petri tubes, using a wide-spectrum environmental substrate & incubation: from salty & hot to cold & acid. As w/ the Andromeda strain, may be silicon-based, or the spores may need extreme environment to spawn. Also, simply try a general fungi incubation method, to see what sprouts, in a hyper-controlled facility of course. =^.^= professor spacedust
Check out this book review, from the Harvard Crimson, 1969: “Infectious”
“The role that the clipper ship used to play in 19th century fiction now is handled by the space program (both novelistically and cinematically, for Kubrick's 2001 held much the same appeal). Where Melville and Dana used to fascinate their readers with descriptions of rigging and trade routes, Crichton delivers mini-lectures on space research, micro-biology, and biochemistry.”
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/8/12/infectious-pbtbhe-andromeda-strain-by-michael
The opening credits read: “ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This film concerns the four-day history of a major American scientific crisis. We received the generous help of many people attached to Project Scoop at Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Wildfire Laboratory in Flatrock, Nevada. They encouraged us to tell the story accurately and in detail. The documents presented here are soon to be made public. They do not in any way jeopardize the national security.”
In Michael Crichton’s own words:
“When the book was published, lots of people thought it was true. It was pretty interesting. When Bob Wise set out to make the movie, his researchers assumed that everything was true, too, so they went out and found all the things the book talked about — the underground laboratory, the computer programs, the biometrics security. After a while I stopped telling people that I had made it all up, because it turned out that it was based on true things. But I didn’t know that when I was writing the book.”
https://www.michaelcrichton.com/works/the-andromeda-strain/
Tuesday, September 26, 2023, 9AM Pacific/12PM Eastern
Special Guest:
Dr. Lindsay Hays
Program Scientist for Astrobiology
NASA
Host:
Dr. Graham Lau
Research Investigator,
Blue Marble Space Institute of Science
Our guest is Dr. Lindsay Hays, Program Scientist for the NASA Astrobiology Program, Deputy Lead Scientist for the Mars Sample Return Campaign, and Program Scientist for the DAVINCI mission to explore Venus.
Lindsay's scientific background includes work on lipid biosignatures for mass extinctions, mass evolutionary radiations, and photosynthetic organisms in hot springs. She spent time at JPL in the Mars Program Office where she was the Sample Return Science System Engineer and also worked on science activities for Humans to Mars. Tune-in for a discussion about field expeditions to Western Australia, exploring the origin and evolution of Venus, and NASA's most recent missions to bring samples from outer space back to Earth.
This program is an interactive talk show where our guest will answer questions from our host, Dr. Graham Lau, followed by your questions submitted via Twitter and YouTube. For more information, visit the official website of Ask An Astrobiologist.
How to Submit Questions:
Join us on social media for even more NASA Astrobiology:
“Security: We want to understand rubble pile asteroids like Bennu in case they have the possibility of hitting Earth one day and so that was an aspect of that. And so that's the “OSIRIS” in “OSIRIS-Rex.” So all of those things are of interest to this mission.”
https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/return-of-OREx-part-ii
“Bennu is a leftover fragment from the tumultuous formation of the solar system. Some of the mineral fragments inside Bennu could be older than the solar system. These microscopic grains of dust could be the same ones that spewed from dying stars and eventually coalesced to make the Sun and its planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago.”
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/517/why-bennu-10-reasons/
It's a gift that will keep on giving
Samples of Bennu will return to Earth on September 24, 2023. OSIRIS-REx scientists will study a quarter of the regolith. The rest will be made available to scientists around the globe, and also saved for those not yet born, using techniques not yet invented, to answer questions not yet asked.
For more information on OSIRIS-REx, plus the latest mission updates, visit:
https://www.asteroidmission.org/
The Ask an Astrobiologist sounds fascinating! Thank you!