Re: Not surprising
It does seems quite obvious that DNA must be hardy stuff.
My girlfriend is still coveting her "I play with DNA" mug, in her profession. She assures me that DNA also has some phenomenally wonderful "error correction" within it so that even if it does get a little damaged, it would hardly matter. Obviously occasionally this backfires in the same way as any error correcting algorithm and, given the wrong combination of errors, could churn out junk and mutations, but overall it's pretty self-managing and in the billions of DNA copies made every day, pretty much all of them work just fine.
And, in the end, although we think of DNA as a organic thing, it's really just a chain of four basic chemicals. Thus our perception of DNA as some fragile, living entity is far from the truth. We use DNA to build computers, biological machines, etc. It's sturdy stuff. And the commenting about SmartWater and contamination - being the IT guy living with the geneticist woman, this has also come up. The chemicals and procedures used to ensure contamination isn't carried over can be quite horrendous precisely because of this. And it makes me wonder quite how hard it would be to get away with murder if the forensics team do turn up.
And we know that in bones and bodies buried for hundreds of years, it survives on a biologically-active plane. In the relative sterility of space's vacuum, I can't see how at least the basic building blocks wouldn't be able to travel between systems quite easily. Not undamaged, most likely, but that would hardly matter as the "seed" for further life. A few million years soon sorts that out.
DNA is hardy stuff indeed.