Mancinelli used a hammer to break one open and found inside a green stripe that turned out to be a thriving colony of microorganisms.
Salt is so hostile to most life forms that people have used it for centuries as a preservative.
Evidence from the flights, launched on Russian Foton rockets, as well as extensive ground experiments, indicate that, indeed, the microbes are in a minuscule minority of known life forms capable of surviving prolonged exposure to the vacuum of space. For the first time since the Apollo program, NASA is preparing to bring home samples from other solar system bodies, including some deemed potentially more hospitable for life than the moon. Mars is the primary target, but among the other candidates are a comet, an asteroid, Jupiter's moon Europa and other major Jovian satellites. At the same time, planetary missions generally are becoming more invasive, raising the potential for reaching bio-friendly environments using subsurface drills, penetrators and robot divers. Expert panels formed by the National Academy of Sciences and a federal interagency task force are issuing recommendations on the issue.