Did Life Catch a Ride on a Meteor? Russia’s Spacecraft Packed with 1,500 Flies, 75 Mice, Seeds—and Basalt Rocks—Aims to Prove Lithopanspermia
A Russian satellite crash-landed in a field southwest of Moscow earlier this month, carrying a cargo that sounds like science fiction: about 1,500 flies, 75 mice, seeds, microbes, and various cell tissues. The mission, Bion-M No 2, was designed to study how space affects living organisms and to test a provocative idea: panspermia—the theory that life can travel between worlds on rocks and seed planets elsewhere. A special twist was to embed basalt rocks with bacterial strains inside the spacecraft shell to see whether microbes could survive the fiery descent back to Earth.
In This Article:
What They Were Testing: Panspermia and Lithopanspermia
Panspermia is the idea that life can hitch a ride on comets, meteors, or asteroids and seed other worlds. Lithopanspermia is a subset: rock fragments ejected from exoplanets or asteroid impacts could travel through space and seed another planet with surviving microbes. To test this, scientists inserted bacterial strains into basalt rocks and tucked them into the Bion-M No 2 shell, hoping to observe whether any microbes survived re-entry.
How the Experiment Was Designed and Carried Out
The flight was a collaboration between Roscosmos and the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It launched on August 20 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and circulated Earth for about 30 days in a region higher than the International Space Station. In Telegram posts cited by Space.com, officials described the mission and showed scientists cracking open the scorched shell and removing metal cylinders. Roscosmos explained that the research would help scientists understand how space phenomena affect living organisms in regions where cosmic radiation is about 30 percent higher than in near-Earth orbit, a factor for long-distance space travel. “If any of these studied strains survive, it will be strong evidence supporting lithopanspermia,” said Alexander Anatolyevich, a researcher at IBMP.
The Landing and Early Findings
The capsule landed on September 19. Russian officials reported that ten of the 74 mice seemed to have perished, with no word on the status of the flies or other specimens. Dramatic photos posted by Russian officials on Telegram showed scientists cracking open the damaged spacecraft and removing metal cylinders. Roscosmos framed the mission as a step toward understanding how space conditions affect living organisms in harsher radiation environments, a factor relevant to future long-distance missions.
A History Lesson and the Road Ahead
This isn’t the first time scientists have sent animals into orbit. In June 1948, the United States sent Albert I, a rhesus monkey, into space from White Sands, New Mexico, beginning a long and controversial line of experiments that saw cats, dogs, and other animals die in space or during reentry. Researchers who study extremophiles see resilience in space as a sign that life could exist elsewhere, but critics warn about ethics and risk. Experiments like this probe one of humanity’s oldest questions: could life travel across the void and seed other worlds—and what would that mean for humanity’s future in space?
