Update on Project MERCCURI a.k.a. #spacemicrobes

After 9 months of technical delays, during which time our collection of frozen built environment microbes went around the earth every 90 minutes, we are finally getting growth data from the International Space Station (ISS)!   Astronaut Terry Virts has been taking daily growth readings of our collection of 48 microbes and today (Friday) is …

Microbes from the built environment finally head to space, #spacemicrobes

After 1.5 years of collection events, culturing, identification, and selection of candidates our space microbes experiment finally is in orbit.  Our 48 microbes, collected from a variety of built environments on earth, are now whipping around the planet.  The rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral at 3:25pm EST yesterday.  In a …

Educator Guide for Project MERCCURI (#spacemicrobes)

From the start, Project MERCCURI has involved classrooms and students in the process of citizen science.  Many of our samples were collected by students and the microbes going into space from JPL were voted on by a number of high-school classrooms. Now we have a “Project MERCCURI Educator’s Guide” which contains a detailed overview of …

Project MERCCURI Presentation at NSTA2013

Today our Project MERCCURI team gave a presentation at the National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) meeting in San Antonio.   We talked mostly about the project, but also about ways that teachers could incorporate microbiology of the built environment in their classrooms.  There’s a lot of interest in taking the kinds of work being done in …