Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment
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 experiment would have tested one aspect of panspermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another.If they had already been studied in space conditions so much the better, since it would enable researchers to pinpoint precisely how organisms were affected by the years-long exposure to the interplanetary environment.The 10 'passenger' organisms selected are listed below:[12] Bacteria[13] Archaea[17] Eukaryote[18] The mass of the Bio-Module on board the Fobos-Grunt spacecraft was 100 grams or less.It also accommodated a native sample of bacteria – derived from a permafrost region on Earth – within a cavity 26 mm in diameter.