Tough Fungi Could Survive the Trip to Mars

High Bay 1 at JPL, which likely has some fungi living somewhere within it, even while the Mars 2020 rover was being worked on in it. Credit - NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat – fungi.

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