MASE Glacier as Mars Analogue site for microbial Space Exploration

Details

Summary

Assessing the habitability of Mars and detecting life, if it was ever there, depends on the knowledge of life itself and its tolerance towards (extreme) environmental conditions. In particular, many combinations of stress, such as high radiation conditions combined with high salt and low temperature, relevant for early Mars, have not been investigated.

Objectives

Our overall aim in this project is to implement a step change in our understanding of Martian habitability and our ability to detect organisms that might have made use of habitable environments. We hypothesize, that:

• The microbial diversity, being present at the AMADEE glacier site can be sampled under Mars simulation conditions
• We are able to cultivate anaerobic microorganisms with different resistances from these sites
• We are able to detect life in debris of the glacier using on-site and off-site experiments for the detection of microbial metabolic activity and biomarkers

Experiment Data