NASA program finds alien-like life right here on Earth

• The end of a scientific journey -- started five years ago in a frozen tunnel deep below the Alaska tundra -- came in January for NASA astrobiologist Dr. Richard Hoover.
• It proved a long, arduous journey for Hoover and his colleagues to complete the process of identifying a unique new life form.
• For the life form itself, a new bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium, the journey to discovery took much longer -- some 32,000 years.
• Extremophiles are hardy life forms that exist and flourish in conditions hostile to most known organisms, from the potentially toxic chemical levels of salt-choked lakes and alkaline deserts to the extreme heat of deep-sea volcanoes.
• This search is a key element of the Vision for Space Exploration, the ambitious effort to return Americans to the Moon and to conduct robotic and human exploration of Mars and other worlds in our Solar System, which might conceal life forms unimaginable to us -- thriving in conditions few Earth species could tolerate.
• The research site near Fox, Alaska, just north of Fairbanks, was carved by the Army Corps of Engineers in the mid-1960s to enable geologists and other scientists to study permafrost -- the mix of permanently frozen ice, soil and rock -- in preparation for construction in the early 1970s of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline.
• The bacteria had frozen near the end of the Pleistocene Age, which extended from about 1.8 million years ago to just 11,000 years ago -- and earned the new organism its name.
• Further testing revealed the organism was not a psychrophile at all, but a "psychrotolerant" -- not an organism that thrives only at very cold temperatures, but one capable of enduring deep cold that resumes normal activity when temperatures rise.
• The bimonthly periodical, the official journal of record for new bacterial species, is produced by the Society for General Microbiology.