Development of extreme environment systems for seeking out extremophiles

The last 25 years have witnessed a tremendous change in the way scientists view the viability of lifeforms. Organisms can adapt to rather incredible environments of pressure, temperature, salinity, pH and assorted adverse chemistries. The authors establish methods for both surviving and replicating in those harsh conditions. Past efforts to study and understand these organisms have often extracted (or attempted to extract) them from their environment to place them in laboratory settings for examination. Often this approach constitutes too drastic a transition, causing the destruction of the objects of interest. The new task facing extremophile explorers is to find ways to detect and observe these entities in their natural state without excessive disturbances. An associated issue concerns the optimization of observing and measurement time in the hostile environment, especially in the domain of deep ocean hydrothermal vents. A new paradigm driven by cost and temporal-based studies is needed to enable maximum effectiveness of the time at these inhospitable sites. The work in progress by the JPL/Caltech group seeks to enable the informed scientist/engineer to make real-time decisions on the merit of which measurements are to be accomplished immediately and whether the selected site has sufficient merit to continue time-consuming measurements at that location