By simulating the crushing shock of a Mars asteroid impact, researchers found that a hardy bacterium can survive extreme ejection pressures. The discovery strengthens the idea that life could travel between planets inside impact debris. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

The extremophile bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans can survive the pressures developed during ejection from Mars as a result of massive asteroid impact. Craters on the Moon and Mars show how frequently bodies in our solar system are hit by incoming material, and impacts are an important process in planetary history. Lily Zhao, K. T. Ramesh, and colleagues simulated the conditions under which a microbe might be hurled into space by the force of an impact, subjecting Deinococcus radiodurans to pressures of up to 3 GPa (30,000 times atmospheric pressure) by putting the cells between two steel plates and then hitting that steel sandwich with a third plate.…