You've heard of Sputnik, that little tiny antenna-clad chunk of metal heaved into low orbit on October 4, 1957, effectively kicking off the Space Age?
Well, make way for Gutnik. A news release issued by NASA's Ames Research Center foretells the launch into space of a satellite inhabited by a bunch of nano-mariners who, left to their own devices, would no doubt rather curl up inside a bowel.
Sometime in the next one to three years, according to the release, a so-called "nanosatellite" weighing about 30 pounds and peopled by the intestinal bug E. coli will streak into the sky, with the mission of amassing data on whether the zero-gravity environment that cloaks our planet might increase microbes' resistance to antibiotics. That's important, because, as the release states:
Bacterial antibiotic resistance may pose a danger to astronauts in microgravity, where the immune response is weakened. Scientist believe that the results of this experiment could help design effective countermeasures to protect astronauts' health during long-duration human space missions.
E. coli is probably the most-studied micro-organism in all of science. While most strains are harmless and actually quite friendly (producing vitamin K for us, just to name one of the nice things they do), some of them can cause food poisoning, urinary-tract infections and more.
Gutnik (whose real name is EcAMSat) is the brainchild of Stanford microbiologist A.C. Matin, PhD, the principal investigator for the joint NASA/Stanford University School of Medicine project. Matin's previous inventions include microbes capable of gobbling up environmental toxins like uranium and chromium, as well as magnetic-field-seeking bacteria that can increase the contrast of magnetic-resonance imaging. So this new satellite caper is just one more in a series of wild but potentially very useful feats of imagination.
The thing that really knocks me out, though, is how all these scientists and engineers will manage to get those billions of little tiny bugs to sit still while the chin straps on their little tiny space helmets are being fastened.
Previously: Space: A new frontier for doctors and patients and Outer-space ultrasound technologies land on Earth
Photo by Per Olof Forsberg
