Mold can survive in extreme space environments

growing inside the International Space Station.anyone who has ever been infected with fungi knows that this microbe is hard to kill. Mold has also proved to be highly resistant to harsh space environments. The researchers report at the Astrobiology Conference in Bellevue, Washington, that mold spores can survive in radiation environments 200 times the lethal dose of human life. This radiation resistance may make it difficult for astronauts to eliminate the harmful effects of mold on human health. Mold spores from hitchhiing on Earth may one day threaten the safety of other objects in the solar system.
living on the International Space Station (ISS) have been struggling with mold on the station's walls and instruments. Of course, the mold survives in a protective structure in low-Earth orbit, where radiation doses are low. Outside the space station, cosmic radiation doses are high, and even higher on the casings of spacecraft traveling to Mars or beyond.
To find out exactly what happens to mold in space, Marta Cortesao, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center in Cologne, and colleagues fired X-rays and heavy ions at a common black mold called occicin, which is widely found in ISS.
Cortesao said the researchers emitted a "stupid amount" of radiation, far more than a spacecraft flying to Mars (0.6 gori per year) or the surface of Mars (0.2 gori per year). Gorry represents the unit that absorbs the dose of radiant energy.
researchers found that ocyctic spores can survive at radiation doses of 500 to 1,000 gori, depending on the type of radiation they are exposed to. In contrast, radiation sickness occurs in the human body at a radiation dose of 0.5 gori and dies when the dose reaches 5 gori.
Cortesao also found that the mold spores survived a large amount of high-energy ultraviolet radiation, which is commonly used as a hospital disinfection tool and is proposed for disinfection of spacecraft surfaces.
Cortesao warned that her research focused only on cosmic radiation and did not include all aspects of the harsh outer space environment. But she says at least one earlier study showed that mold spores were more resistant to radiation in a vacuum. At the same time, one thing is certain, she says: "That's that we're definitely going to carry all kinds of spores on space travel." Fungi have been forgotten for the past twenty or thirty years, but now it's time to get back to them. Andrew
, a microbiologist and Mars astrobiologist at the University of Florida at North Merriott, agrees. So far, he said, efforts to prevent microbes from contaminating other planets have focused on bacteria, since most of the microbes attached to the spacecraft's surface are bacteria. "I really like the description, 'Let's not forget another microbe called fungus,'" Schuerger said. Paul Mason
astrobiologist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, Said the discovery is also important for scientists studying the origins of life.
It's because a puzzle in the study of the origins of life is that the Earth seems to have evolved the rather complex microbes of its early history from the pre-origin stages of life from start to finish -- a process that some scientists believe should take longer than earth to become habitable.
that there is a view that life originated elsewhere, either in our solar system or further a year, says Mason. "Now that we know that life on Earth can survive in space, the idea that it might reach Earth from somewhere else is certainly reasonable, " he said. ”（