Saturday, January 28, 2006

Presentation connects caves with life on other planets

Argen Duncan El Defensor Chieftain Reporter

Who would have thought New Mexico caves relate to the search for extraterrestrial life?

Director of the New Mexico Tech Cave and Karst Studies Program Penelope Boston is scheduled to present her work Sunday, 2 p.m., at Socorro Public Library. The presentation will cover topics such as technology for exploration and colonization beyond earth, as well as cave microorganisms and how they tie into the search for life on other planets, Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Socorro Public Library. The event is free and open to the public, including children.

"We love having kids," said adult services librarian Jeffrey Bridges.

He said the presentation would last 45 minutes to an hour.

Refreshments will be served and the annual Friends of the Socorro Public Library meeting will follow. Attendees don't have to come to the meeting, but they can.

"I have a lot of wonderful pictures," Boston said. "And if they want to know what's right under their feet here in New Mexico that they didn't even know existed, I'll try to give them a glimpse of that hidden world that they don't see in their day-to-day lives."

Bridges said he heard about Boston's work, thought it sounded interesting and so asked her to speak.

Boston, also an associate professor in earth and environmental sciences, said much of her work focuses on exotic cave-dwelling microorganisms that live by getting energy from inorganic material.

"So they're not eating food the way you and I eat food," she said, adding they also don't eat like other microorganisms.

The creatures live in caves or other underground formations and have little access to energy.

The microorganisms mine the subsurface area for materials like sulfur and manganese, which they chemically transform to produce a tiny "packet of energy" for survival. Because they get so little energy and have no predators, the creatures live at a slow pace, Boston said.

If she cultured bacteria found on people, it would grow visibly in a few hours. The cave microorganisms Boston studies, however, take from weeks to years to grow.

"While it's difficult to (culture them), it's very instructive in terms of looking for life on other planets," she said.

Boston said the relevancy lies in the concept that people don't know how different or similar extraterrestrial life will be in terms of pace, scale and density compared to that on earth. Alien life might respond so slowly that discoverers have trouble recognizing it as alive.

The subsurface microorganisms offer a chance to practice identifying such life forms on earth in a different environment, she said.

She also plans to talk about her NASA-funded research to find technologies to allow humans to live in caves on the moon and Mars.

Mars has no magnetic fields to protect it from ionizing radiation as Earth does. Boston said rock provides some of the best insulation against the radiation.

Also, caves provide structure for living already on the planet.

Shipping material through space for building or protecting people from radiation costs a lot.

Lastly, Boston intends to talk about her work to develop "hopping microbots" in conjunction with scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Developers are beginning to move past the concept stage.

The machines, which would all have different abilities, could get into subsurface areas and work together for collect data and explore.

"They move as a swarm, so they're all in communication with each other," Boston said.

Scientists would be able to send thousands of them, so they could lose a lot and still have a mission.

She said developers think the design provides enough flexibility to explore any subsurface formation on any solid planet.

"It's a different strategy," Boston said.

The robots don't operate from one centralized brain, but work more like an ant colony, she said. She believes the microbots' combined abilities will be greater than those of one robot with centralized functions.

aduncan@dchieftain.com

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