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At the space station Luca Parmitano, an astronaut from the European Space Agency, placed some in a centrifuge rotated at speed to simulate the gravity of Mars or Earth. Other champions have experimented with the free environment of space. Further control experiments were performed on the ground.
After 21 days, the bacteria were killed and the samples returned to Earth for analysis.
For two of the three species of bacteria, the results were disappointing. But S. desiccabilis increased the amount of rare earth elements extracted from basalt by about double, even in a zero gravity environment.
“We were surprised,” said Dr. Cockell, explaining that without gravity, there is no convection that usually takes waste away from bacteria and replenishes nutrients around cells.
“One could therefore speculate that microgravity will prevent microbes from biominating or stress them so much that they will not biominate,” he said. “We haven’t really seen any effect.”
The results were even better for Mars’ lower gravity.
Payam Rasoulnia, a PhD student at the University of Finland at Tampere who studied the biomination of rare earth elements, described the results of the BioRock experiment as interesting, but noted that yields were “very low even in the experiments.” terrestrial “.
Dr Cockell said BioRock was not designed to optimize mining. “We are really looking into the basic process behind biomination,” he said. “But it’s definitely not a demonstration of commercial mining.”
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