Isotopic evolution of planetary crusts by hypervelocity impacts evidenced by Fe in microtektites.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Chernonozhkin SM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8458397 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Enceladus is a prime candidate in the solar system for in-depth astrobiological studies searching for habitability and life because it has a liquid water ocean with significant organic content and ongoing cryovolcanic activity. The presence of ice plumes that jet up through fissures in the ice crust covering the sub-surface ocean, enables remote sampling and in-situ analysis via a fly-by mission. However, capture and transport of organic materials to organic analyzers presents distinctive challenges as it is unknown whether, and to what extent, organic molecules imbedded in ice particles can be captured and survive hypervelocity impacts. This manuscript provides a fluorescence microscopic method to parametrically determine the amount of an organic fluorescent tracer dye, Pacific Blue™ (PB) deposited on a metallic surface. This method can be used to measure the capture and survival outcomes of terrestrial hypervelocity impact experiments where an ice projectile labeled with Pacific Blue impacts a soft metal surface. This work is an important step in the advancement of instruments like the Enceladus Organic Analyzer for detecting biosignatures in an Enceladus plume fly-by mission. An apparatus consisting of a substrate humidification shroud coupled with an epifluorescence microscope with CCD detector is developed to measure the intensity of quantitatively deposited Pacific Blue droplets under controlled humidity. Calibration curves are produced that relate the integrated fluorescence intensity of humidified PB droplets on metal foils to the number of PB molecules deposited. To demonstrate the utility of this method, our calibrations are used to analyze and quantitate organic capture and survival (up to 11% capture efficiency) following ice particle impacts at a velocity of 1.7 km/s on an aluminum substrate.
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Project description:BackgroundThe Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF) at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the primary cleanroom facility used in the construction of some of the planetary protection (PP)-sensitive missions developed by NASA, including the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover that launched in July 2020. SAF floor samples (n=98) were collected, over a 6-month period in 2016 prior to the construction of the Mars rover subsystems, to better understand the temporal and spatial distribution of bacterial populations (total, viable, cultivable, and spore) in this unique cleanroom.ResultsCleanroom samples were examined for total (living and dead) and viable (living only) microbial populations using molecular approaches and cultured isolates employing the traditional NASA standard spore assay (NSA), which predominantly isolated spores. The 130 NSA isolates were represented by 16 bacterial genera, of which 97% were identified as spore-formers via Sanger sequencing. The most spatially abundant isolate was Bacillus subtilis, and the most temporally abundant spore-former was Virgibacillus panthothenticus. The 16S rRNA gene-targeted amplicon sequencing detected 51 additional genera not found in the NSA method. The amplicon sequencing of the samples treated with propidium monoazide (PMA), which would differentiate between viable and dead organisms, revealed a total of 54 genera: 46 viable non-spore forming genera and 8 viable spore forming genera in these samples. The microbial diversity generated by the amplicon sequencing corresponded to ~86% non-spore-formers and ~14% spore-formers. The most common spatially distributed genera were Sphinigobium, Geobacillus, and Bacillus whereas temporally distributed common genera were Acinetobacter, Geobacilllus, and Bacillus. Single-cell genomics detected 6 genera in the sample analyzed, with the most prominent being Acinetobacter.ConclusionThis study clearly established that detecting spores via NSA does not provide a complete assessment for the cleanliness of spacecraft-associated environments since it failed to detect several PP-relevant genera that were only recovered via molecular methods. This highlights the importance of a methodological paradigm shift to appropriately monitor bioburden in cleanrooms for not only the aeronautical industry but also for pharmaceutical, medical industries, etc., and the need to employ molecular sequencing to complement traditional culture-based assays. Video abstract.
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