The Experiment
The project includes representatives of all three domains of life: bacteria, eukaryota and archaea. The capsule was transporting 10 types of organisms in 30 self-contained samples, i.e., each in triplicate. In addition, one or more natural native soil samples were flown in their own self contained capsule. The Phobos-Soil sample return mission was the only attempted biological science mission that would have returned to Earth from deep space, far beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field; sending biological samples through deep space is therefore a much better test of interplanetary survivability than sending the samples on a typical Earth-orbiting flight.
The project was being done in collaboration with the Russian Space Research Institute, the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Moscow State University, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), and the Institute for Aerospace Medicine in Germany.
Read more about this topic: Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment
Famous quotes containing the word experiment:
“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
—David Cronenberg (b. 1943)