[SpaceProgram] Introduction & Leightweight probes

[Máté Ravasz]

@Andreas
I'm sorry, I wouldn't want to hijack your original post, but I thought we
might share a common interest here.

Yes, Puli Space is an official competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize for
more than a year now ( http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/teams/team-puli ),
but we are largely busy with building our rover. So side projects like a
capsule with living things is something we don't really have resources for,
although we could take it on board if was outsourced at least in part.

My idea would be a small unit, much like the LIFE experiment prepared for
the Fobos-Grunt mission (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Interplanetary_Flight_Experiment ), but
instead of Phobos, we could send it to our Moon.

This could hold lichens, however we could place multiple organisms there
including bacteria, archaea and even some eukaryotes (tardigrada are my
personal favourites).

The difference compared to LIFE would be a live monitoring of the samples,
either by simply taking liquid cultures of bacteria and measuring optical
density from time to time, or by using a mini camera which would take
pictures from time to time.

Gotta run now, if this sparks interest, then I am happy to discuss it in
more detail, and maybe we can come up with something. I think a project
like this would fit well in hackerspace environment, and would provide very
cool results if succeded: we could be the first to monitor a long term
habitat of earthlings on the Moon. :)
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