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If some of them survive the flight, that might mean that these bacteria may have already survived a trip to the Red Planet as hitchhikers on a Mars rover. That’s when Vaishampayan and Smith will get to analyze how many bacteria have died, and whether their DNA has changed in any way. Photo: NASA / Ames Research Center / Tristan Caro A small metal card used to transport bacteria. Once they’re back on the ground (a parachute will slow down descent), the students will track them by GPS, recover the metal tags, and mail them back to NASA. They’ll fly for about two hours, reaching the stratosphere and eventually popping because of the pressure drop. On eclipse day, the balloons will launch every 15 minutes or so from states that are in the path of the Moon’s shadow, Des Jardins says. One card will fly to the stratosphere, while one will remain on the ground to function as a control group. (Only 34 of the balloons will carry the bacteria.) The microorganisms are dried onto the surface of two metal cards the size of a dog tag. Last week, Smith finished mailing the bacteria - which are not dangerous for people or the environment - to the student groups.
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Smith, a researcher in the Space Biosciences Division at NASA's Ames Research Center. “These are some of the most resilient types of bacteria that we know of,” says David J. It takes around 140 hours at 257 degrees Fahrenheit to kill 90 percent of these bacteria, Vaishampayan tells The Verge.
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These bacteria form shields of spores that allow them to survive even when conditions turn deadly. It was first isolated from soil outside a spacecraft-assembly facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 1973, says Parag Vaishampayan, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The bacteria that will fly to the edge of space is a particular strain called Paenibacillus xerothermodurans. A photo taken from the stratosphere (84,000 feet up) during one of Montana Space Grant Consortium's high-altitude balloon tests in 2014. “It’s really quite an outstanding astrobiology and planetary protection experiment,” Green says. During the eclipse, conditions will get even more Mars-like: the temperatures will go down even further, and the Moon will buffer some of those ultraviolet rays to better resemble the radiation on the Red Planet. The upper part of the Earth’s stratosphere - just above the ozone layer - is very much like the surface of Mars: it’s about minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, with very rarified air, and it’s hammered by the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. “I said, oh my god, that’s like being on Mars!” Green tells The Verge. When Jim Green, the director of planetary science at NASA, first heard that over 50 balloons were being flown to the stratosphere to live stream the eclipse, he couldn’t believe his ears. The balloons are being sent up by teams of high school and college students from across the US as part of the Eclipse Ballooning Project, led by Angela Des Jardins of Montana State University. “I said, oh my god, that’s like being on Mars!”