Waste Products Test
Gas-exchange experiment
Lifing things should breath
out some waste gasses.
No radioactive labelling in this one.
The experiment:
- Get some regolith.
- Moisten it with ``soup'' containing plain hydrocarbon molecules.
- Look in the gas given off to see what gasses are made.
Control experiment:
- Keep feeding it soup.
- A chemical process might make some gasses, but when the reactants
are used up the process would stop.
- Creatures would keep growing (if they like the soup)
and keep giving off gasses.
Result: Some O2 and CO2 seen at first but more soup did not lead to more
O2 and CO2 production.
But maybe the creatures died (again).
So it still appears that the regolith is just
chemically reactive.
ASTR 121 Home
Davison E. Soper, Institute of Theoretical Science,
University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403 USA
soper@bovine.uoregon.edu