Tersicoccus

Tersicoccus phoenicis
Microscopic image of Tersicoccus phoenicis
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Bacteria
Phylum:	Actinobacteria
Class:	Actinobacteria
Subclass:	Actinobacteridae
Order:	Actinomycetales
Suborder:	Micrococcineae
Family:	Micrococcaceae
Genus:	Tersicoccus
Species:	T. phoenicis
Binomial name
Tersicoccus phoenicis Vaishampayan, et al., 2013

Tersicoccus phoenicis is a member of the bacterial family Micrococcaceae. It has only been found in two spacecraft assembly clean room facilities and is resistant to the methods normally used to clean such facilities. The species name is derived from tersi, Latin for clean; coccus, Greek for berry; and phoenicis, from NASA's Phoenix lander, the spacecraft being prepared when these bacteria were first discovered.

T. phoenicis are only known to exist at two locations on Earth, and were independently found in geographically separated clean room facilities nearly 4,000 km (2,500 mi) apart. One example was located during a 2007 microbial test swabbing of the Phoenix lander's clean room floor in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center (Florida, United States), while the other was found in the Herschel Space Observatory's clean room at Guiana Space Centre (Kourou, French Guiana).

Parag Vaishampayan, a microbiologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, suggests that this species may exist naturally outside of the clean room environment but has not been seen before due to the difficulty in isolating a single microbe type among the wide variety of different types found in nature.

These bacteria are non-spore-forming, aerobic, non-motile, and Gram-positive. They are roughly spherical (coccus) in shape and measure approximately 1 micrometre (0.00004 in) in diameter. This species maintains a coccal morphology throughout their growth; the rod–coccus life cycle typically observed in nearly all Arthrobacter species is not present. They are able to survive in environments with few nutrients.

...
Wikipedia