Why is NASA sending bacteria into the sky on balloons during the eclipse

NASA released Paenibacillus xerothermodurans bacteria

The bacteria that will fly to the edge of space is a particular strain called Paenibacillus xerothermodurans. It was first isolated from soil outside a spacecraft-assembly facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 1973, says Parag Vaishampayan, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These bacteria form shields of spores that allow them to survive even when conditions turn deadly. It takes around 140 hours at 257 degrees Fahrenheit to kill 90 percent of these bacteria, Vaishampayan tells The Verge.

The microorganisms are dried onto the surface of two metal cards the size of a dog tag. One card will fly to the stratosphere, while one will remain on the ground to function as a control group. On eclipse day, the balloons will launch every 15 minutes or so from states that are in the path of the Moon’s shadow, Des Jardins says. They’ll fly for about two hours, reaching the stratosphere and eventually popping because of the pressure drop. Once they’re back on the ground (a parachute will slow down descent), the students will track them by GPS, recover the metal tags, and mail them back to NASA.

That’s when Vaishampayan and Smith will get to analyze how many bacteria have died, and whether their DNA has changed in any way. If some of them survive the flight, that might mean that these bacteria may have already survived a trip to the Red Planet as hitchhikers on a Mars rover. We don’t know for sure whether Paenibacillus xerothermodurans is actually on any Mars rover. (It was found outside the spacecraft-assembly facility, not on the spacecraft themselves, Vaishampayan says.) But even if it’s not, learning more about these resilient bacteria could help us understand how similar ones could behave on Mars, and help NASA better understand the risk of infecting other worlds.
“These are some of the most resilient types of bacteria that we know of

An update comming with what we have found out about Paenibacillus xerothermodurans
And the truth is stranger than fiction, stay tuned!!!