Moss survives exposure to space in International Space Station experiment
Mosses are known to thrive in some of Earth’s harshest environments, from Death Valley’s scorching heat to the freezing peaks of mountains. Now, researchers have discovered that this tiny green plant can even survive the vacuum of space.
Ever wonder what the aurora borealis over Earth looks like from space? Video shared by astronaut Zena Cardman shows the view from the International Space Station earlier this month. The space station was flying over the United States at the time.
It turns out moss is one of the few plants that even the vacuum of space can’t kill.
Mosses are remarkably resilient, thriving in extreme conditions on Earth — from the intense heat of Death Valley, California, to the frigid cold atop mountain peaks. A new study conducted aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has revealed that these hardy plants can also survive exposure to outer space.
The research, published Thursday in the journal iScience by Cell Press, analyzed data from an experiment that exposed moss spores to the harsh environment outside the ISS between March 2022 and January 2023. After the samples were returned to Earth, scientists found that about 80% of the spores had survived for nine months in space and were still capable of reproducing.
On the right, germinated moss spores after space exposure. On left, the space exposure unit used for the experiment next to a 100-yen coin for scale. (Image credit: Dr. Chang-hyun Maeng, Maika Kobayash, Tomomichi Fujita)
“We expected almost zero survival, but the result was the opposite— most of the spores survived,” lead author Tomomichi Fujita of Hokkaido University said in a news release. “We were genuinely astonished by the extraordinary durability of these tiny plant cells.”
Fujita said his team chose to study moss because of its ability to withstand extreme environments on Earth. Still, researchers hypothesized that the stresses of space, including cosmic radiation, extreme temperature shifts, and microgravity, would prove too damaging for the plant cells to endure.
Instead, the moss’s success in space challenges that assumption and could have far-reaching implications. Scientists say the findings could help inform future efforts to develop sustainable ecosystems on the moon, Mars or other planets, where plants might one day play a key role in supporting human life.
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