Russia continues to move ahead with its Phobos-Grunt mission, which involves a spacecraft landing on Phobos, studying the moon's surface for a year, and returning samples to earth. The mission is slated to launch this December. The ambitious project will also involve the Chinese, who plan to add a sub-probe Yinghuo 1. This subprobe represents China's first planetary mission. So our moon is only one of many targets for the growing Chinese space program.
The Russian mission will also include tiny passengers. A Scientific American article notes that The Planetary Society along with the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have created the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE), which will include a variety of earth organisms:
The LIFE organisms were chosen with this danger in mind. Among the four bacteria to make the trip will be radiation-resistant Deinococcus radiodurans. Tardigrades, microscopic, eight-limbed invertebrates also known as water bears, were selected for their ability to repair DNA damage. Rounding out the group are three species of archaea—sometimes called "extremophiles" for their ability to thrive in conditions too harsh for other Earth life—along with yeast, plant seeds, and a soil sample collected from Israel's Negev Desert. Most of the samples will be freeze-dried and inert for the trip, to better resist the cold of space. And what does The Planetary Society hope to learn from this mission? Here is the Society's own statement:
Will some microbes survive the brutal space environment for this long? We will have to wait and see. If no microbes survive, this does not necessarily rule out the possibility of transpermia, but it certainly calls it into question more. But if some of the organisms do make it alive to Phobos and back, then at least we would know that some life could indeed survive an interplanetary journey over a 3-year period inside a rock.
Surprisingly, this will be the first sample returned from another planet/moon since 1976. I remember there was a fair amount of concern about bringing back samples from our moon when it was first proposed. However, in addition to concerns about bringing Phobos sample back to earth, some have questioned the logic of bringing life to the Martian realm.
The Planetary Society is saying the mission complies with the Committee on Space Research of the International Council for Science planetary protection guidelines aimed at preventing the contamination of Mars by introducing terrestrial life onto the surface of Mars. Sadly, given the track record of past missions, the chance of a spacecraft failure and crash on the surface of Phobos is not so remote.