NASA is one of those agencies that has the ability to do really cool things just to see what’s going to happen, or what’s there – and the little kid inside all of us has to love that.

Recently, they took samples from the outside of the space station to just see what, if anything, grows in space.

Astronauts Loral O’Hara and Andreas Morgensen are the ones taking the spacewalk to gather those exterior swabs. They’re looking for microorganisms that could survive under some of the most extreme conditions out there.

Astronauts mounted a box to the outside of the International Space Station in 2015 in the hopes of exposing microbes to cryogenic temps and high levels of radiation.

In 2020, Japanese researchers wrote that one of the bacteria in the box – Deinococcus radiodurans – was able to survive there for three years.

The German Aerospace Center ran a separate experiment from 2014-2016 and also found that some simple organisms were able to survive in those extreme conditions.

Astrobiologist Jean-Pierre de Vera made a statement about why this is such important information to have as we gear up to explore Mars.

“Of course, this does not mean that life actually exists on Mars. But the search for life is more than ever the strongest driving force for the next generation of missions to Mars.”

The samples collected from the outside of the ISS this time with further our understanding, and hopefully bring us a step or two closer to learning what sort of life might be able to survive outside Earth’s atmosphere.

I’m pretty curious!