(Mirror Daily, United States) – The news that Russia has probably found “alien life” on the outside of the international space laboratory known as the International Space Station (ISS) has made the global headlines.
However, the discovery is backed by little evidence and Russia is not very cooperative.
It all started when Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who will lead the next mission to the ISS in December, said that Russian scientists found what seemed to be microbial life from outer space on the surface of the ISS during an experiment.
The Russians have conducted at least a couple of experiments designed to prevent our microbes from contaminating alien worlds: Biorisk and Test. Both experiments are monitoring how fungi and microbes are faring in space.
During the Test experiment, scientists placed microorganisms on the ISS surface for some time and returned the samples to Earth to see how the bugs have fared there. Shkaplerov said that researchers found bacteria “that were absent during the launch of the ISS module” during the analysis.
‘Alien’ Microbes Pose No Danger
He believes the microorganisms came from space and picked ISS’s as their new home. The cosmonaut assured the public that the tiny bacteria “pose no danger”.
However, some skeptics claim that even though the tiny bugs weren’t there when the module launched, they could’ve come from Earth. The ISS is not orbiting that far from our planet, and past research revealed that a special class of microbes called tardigrades can survive in space.
The Russian space agency Roscomsmos suggested that the microorganisms are alien and that they arrived at the ISS via space dust. A similar theory was pushed by the agency three years ago when Roscosmos claimed that cosmonauts found traces of alien sea plankton on ISS’s surface.
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