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Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment

Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment
LIFE Bio-Module Assy Exploded 4 lg.jpg
'LIFE' Bio-Module
Mission type Astrobiological experiment on board the Fobos-Grunt spacecraft.
Operator The Planetary Society
Website www.planetary.org
Mission duration 3 years (planned)
Spacecraft properties
Manufacturer NPO Lavochkin
Launch mass <100 g (3.5 oz)
Start of mission
Launch date November 8, 2011,
Rocket Zenit-2SB
Launch site Baikonur 45/1
Contractor Roscosmos
Deployed from Fobos-Grunt
End of mission
Deactivated Fobos-Grunt failed before TMI
Decay date 15 January 2012 (2012-01-16)

The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE or Phobos LIFE) was an interplanetary mission developed by the Planetary Society. It consisted of sending selected microorganisms on a three-year interplanetary round-trip in a small capsule aboard the Russian Fobos-Grunt spacecraft in 2011, which was a failed sample-return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. The Fobos-Grunt mission failed to leave Earth orbit, and was destroyed.

The goal was to test whether selected organisms can survive an as yet undetermined number of years in deep space by flying them through interplanetary space. The experiment would have tested one aspect of transpermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another.

Prior to the Phobos LIFE experiment, a precursor LIFE prototype was successfully flown in 2011 aboard the final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-134. Known as the Shuttle-LIFE (also LIFE) experiment.

The project includes representatives of all three domains of life: bacteria, eukaryota and archaea. The capsule was transporting 10 types of organisms in 30 self-contained samples, i.e., each in triplicate. In addition, one or more natural native soil samples were flown in their own self-contained capsule. The Phobos-Soil sample return mission was the only attempted biological science mission that would have returned to Earth from deep space, far beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field; sending biological samples through deep space is therefore a much better test of interplanetary survivability than sending the samples on a typical Earth-orbiting flight.

The project was being done in collaboration with the Russian Space Research Institute, the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Moscow State University, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), and the Institute for Aerospace Medicine in Germany.


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