NASA to host a major press conference on living microorganisms trapped inside crystals in a mine in Mexico. Life forms which have been living inside crystals for up to 60,000 years.
The director of NASA's astrobiology institute and her team spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua looking for extremophiles, which contain caves as large as cathedrals. They found that these strange microwaves survive on a diet of sulfate, manganese and copper oxide.
The mine is filled with giant gypsum crystal some as long as 50 feet. This is discovery has not been published yet in a single scientific journal. Though the led Boston to believe that living organisms may also have survived in the extreme environments of other planets and moons in our solar system. When Dr. Boston first saw the picture of this cave she assumed it had been a Photoshop hoax.
Based on the latest report of The Daily Star, The research groups have been discovered 100 different bugs, which were mostly bacteria, were found inside a crystal. Scientist presumed that they had been trapped for between 10,000 and 60,000 years. 90 percent had never been seen before.
According to a report on Telegraph, The cave system is located above a large pocket of volcanic magma and is geothermally-heated to temperatures of up to 60°C, which has led to astrobiologists dubbing it 'hell'. Astrobiologists also worry about the risk that Earth organisms could contaminate other planets in the course of missions to places like Mars, which has already been visited by several U.S. robots.
Now NASA has decided to bring back rock and ice samples from Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, which is one of the best targets in the solar system for life because it has a salty ocean beneath its crust. The concerns are not new. During the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s, astronauts returning from the moon were quarantined. The microorganisms found in the Naica mine are not even the oldest discovered to date. Several years ago scientists reported finding microbes in ice and salt that was up to 500,000 years old.
