Global Space Station Swarming with Bacteria

Attempting to establish a baseline for monitoring the cleanliness of the orbiting laboratory, as well as determine how the microbe populations on the facility differ from those found on Earth, Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and his colleagues took samples from the ISS as well as from two cleanrooms at their Pasadena-based campus.

Time Magazine published an article this morning on UT alumnus Scott Kelly and fellow astronaut Kjell Lindgren, and the six-hour space walk the two are having to conduct to perform much-needed repairs on the worldwide Space Station.

NASA scientists from it’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the latest DNA sequencing technologies to rapidly and precisely identify the microorganisms present on the ISS. Dust and dirt just float around in the spacecraft in the microgravity environment instead of settling, as they do on Earth.

Clearly another obstacle to overcome if we are going to take the next step in space exploration is finding a way to keep ourselves clean by interplanetary standards.

With NASA aiming to send astronauts to Mars, i.e. long-term manned missions, it wants to find out what kind of microscopic community humans might inadvertently be taking along with them. Researchers have collected dust from air filter samples and vacuum bags used aboard the ISS.

The bacterial pathogens found at the station were found to be harmless here on Earth, but they could mutate under space conditions and become opportunistic to the health of astronauts, resulting in skin irritations and inflammations to say the least.

This new study hopes to gain more insight in understanding how bacteria behave and adapt in space travel in order for scientists to develop ways to preserve astronaut health in future space missions especially deep space flights to Mars.

“Studying the microbial community on the space station helps us better understand the bacteria present there, so that we can identify species that could potentially damage equipment or pose harms to astronaut health”.

To identify pathogens in the samples collected and to determine their sizes besides learning if they are alive, researchers stained them with a dye.

The findings suggest that Actinobacteria, a type of bacteria associated with human skin, made up a larger proportion of the microbial community in the ISS than in the cleanrooms, which the authors conclude could be due to the more stringent cleaning regimes possible on Earth. “Finally, the results will allow comparisons with other built sites and facilitate future improvements on the ISS that will ensure astronaut health”.

The global Space Station, as seen from space shuttle Atlantis in 2011.