[bastih]

Color me a bad reader: what does this mean? The abstract pretty much leaves me in the abstract.

[jcoc611]

> The presence of terrestrial microorganism within a sample of Ryugu underlines that microorganisms are the world's greatest colonizers and adept at circumventing contamination controls. The presence of microorganisms within space-returned samples, even those subject to stringent contamination controls is, therefore, not necessarily evidence of an extraterrestrial origin.

Basically that preventing terrestrial contamination of extraterrestrial samples is super tough, and in the specific case of Ryugu the study concludes that contamination did occur.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I recall a study from a few years ago that showed that Acinetobacter bacteria can eat the detergents that NASA used to clean spacecraft to prevent contamination: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/bacteria...

[alganet]

It means the sample was spoiled. We can't exactly use it to understand the possibility of extraterrestrial life or life's building blocks.

But since they were very careful, it is still useful to understand other meteorites and how they could have been contaminated as well.

It also serves to predebunk anyone who would want to imply that those microbes were of alien origin.

[plxxyzs]

Basically microorganisms were able to grow in a sterile asteroid sample faster than previously anticipated. So just because there are signs of life in a recently fallen meteorite is less likely to mean there are space bacteria on it.

[pvaldes]

We should expect that, as the area is miraculously devoid of competitors, poisoners like fungus and predators. Those bacteria are the first colonists.

Now we can wait for a colon bacteria colonizing this space turd and the jokes will write itself.

[theamk]

they got asteriod samples, and turns out that Earth bacteria grow great on them. It's a problem because from now on, if a evidence of life is discovered on sapce samples there is always a suspicion it could be contamination.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268396

[swagasaurus-rex]

The samples mined from the Ryugu asteroid were contaminated by earth microorganisms some time between sampling and analysis. That makes it hard to tell the difference between potentially alien microorganisms and just regular earth microorganisms

[asdff]

You can still tell the difference through dna evidence. In this case it would be like a ship returning with an alien book, a worker left an earth based book, you have no clue what book is which but one book shares 99% textual similarity with the king james bible. That one probably originated on earth.

[jfengel]

Which is why I'd just as soon we waited a few extra decades before landing people on Mars. We're chock full of bacteria and they will surely get out. Unlike robots we can't be sterilized.

Once we can be certain that there is no native life, go nuts. Until then it's an irreplaceable bit of data.