How exploring Hawaiian caves helps NASA search for life on Mars

In August 2019, Chloe Fishman crawled right into a cave beneath the biggest lively volcano on the planet. Together with scientists from NASA and different establishments, she had come to Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano to check the microscopic life-forms that would survive beneath, at midnight and remoted subterranean setting generally known as a “lava tube.”

Fishman lowered herself 30 ft by way of a gap within the floor shaped the place a part of the tube had collapsed. She was sporting a headlamp, gloves, and knee pads. As Fishman reached deeper into the darkness, she felt the temperature drop. The moisture within the air swallowed her. When her ft touched the cave flooring, Fishman started to go searching: “It felt like I had entered a special world,” she stated.

She might as nicely have been on Mars. And that is exactly why Fishman and her colleagues had come to Hawaii.

“The microbes we present in Hawaii could possibly be much like microbes that when lived on Mars, and even microbes that reside there in the present day,” stated Fishman, who, on the time of this research, was an undergraduate researcher within the lab of Sarah Stewart Johnson, an affiliate professor at Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. Fishman now could be a researcher on the Gladstone Institutes on the College of California, San Francisco.

Microbes thrived within the Mauna Mortgage lava tube, Fishman and her colleagues discovered, even in areas that obtained no daylight, which most residing issues on Earth must survive. In these darkish areas, the microbes probably have been utilizing chemical substances within the rocks for nourishment.

Fishman and her colleagues found dozens of beforehand unidentified species of microbes. Additionally they gathered insights about their habitats that may inform methods to at least one day accumulate samples in Martian lava tubes, the researchers reported on Feb. 17, 2023, within the Journal of Geophysical Analysis: Planets. Mars is considered one of NASA’s prime locations to seek for indicators of historical or present micro-organisms, with a number of missions underway or being developed.

The lava tube Fishman and her colleagues studied, situated on the northern flank of the volcano, shaped about 200 years in the past, qualifying it as “younger” on the geologic time scale of billions of years. Much less affected than older tubes by water and different weathering situations, a younger Hawaiian tube higher resembles Martian lava tubes as they have been billions of years in the past.

When lava tubes first shaped on Mars, the Crimson Planet was probably much like Earth, with lively volcanoes, an environment, a hotter local weather, and flowing water. Since these situations helped nurture life on Earth, they could have achieved the identical on Mars. Despite the fact that the Martian floor turned inhospitable to residing creatures after the planet shed its environment, cooled, and dried up about 3 billion years in the past, microbes might have migrated underground, scientists suspect.

Contained in the Hawaiian lava tube, illuminated by headlamps, the partitions have been lit up in a mural of yellow, orange, pink, inexperienced, and white. These supplies contained a variety of minerals, together with gypsum and calcite, organized in shapes that reminded Fishman of mushrooms and popcorn. Whereas Fishman had come to the cave to scrape flakes from the to carry again to the lab to search for microbial life, most of her colleagues had come to check the minerals. The mineral work is ongoing, however it should intersect with Fishman’s if a few of the minerals turn into extra probably than others to host microbes. Perception from this analysis might assist Martian rovers pinpoint promising websites to pattern for indicators of previous or current life.

“We’ve recognized minerals much like these discovered at Mauna Loa on the Martian floor and proper beneath it,” stated Amy McAdam, a geochemist at NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland. McAdam is a member of the science crew behind NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is exploring Mars, and in addition analyzing samples plucked from the floor in its onboard chemistry lab.

“Even when it is troublesome to tease out indicators of life in Martian minerals, we are able to nonetheless study so much from them in regards to the environmental situations of early Mars and whether or not these situations have been pleasant to life or not,” McAdam stated.

After every week of labor within the lava tube, Fishman introduced again about 20 half-teaspoon-size samples to Johnson’s lab. She poured every one right into a check tube full of liquid and glass beads the scale of sand grains. A tool within the lab shook them to interrupt aside the samples, thereby releasing cells into the liquid. This allowed Fishman to extract DNA from the cells. Sequencing the DNA revealed the genetic codes for the organisms.

Fishman has sequenced the genomes of 72 new organisms. Up to now, she has analyzed the genomes of two microbes, which allowed her to categorise them based mostly on their traits and so as to add them to international databases.