For the past 18 months, a colony of fungi have lived on the ISS in a low air pressure, high radiation environment, bombarded with ambient cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation, clinging on for life. The goal? To see if this fungi, an Antarctic native that grows inside rocks in some of the driest, coldest conditions on Earth could survive in another cold, dry desert: Mars.

The EXPOSE-E platform, built by the European Space Agency, is located on the outside the International Space Station. There, cultures of microbes are exposed to some of the harshest conditions possible to find out what extremes life can survive in. Along with studying Mars-like conditions, the experiments also investigate comet and meteorite-like conditions to see if life could cling on an interplanetary voyage—lending credence to the theory of panspermia, that life in the universe was seeded by comets and meteors.

The Cryomyces antarcticus and Cryomyces minteri fungi clinged on for dear life in the Mars-like chamber, surviving on a thing mixture of 95 percent carbon dioxide with the few other trace gasses that constitute Mars' atmosphere. On Earth, the air pressure at sea level is 100,000 pascals. The fungi were exposed to just 1 percent of that, similar to Mars' very thin atmosphere, the relic of the time the sun stripped away its more volatile elements.

Of the individual cells in the colony, more than 60 percent survived intact in EXPOSE-E. This means a few things: 1) If Mars once had life, it may still be there today too, and 2) there is a potential for humans to inadvertently contaminate areas of Mars with life. If there is no life on Mars right now, #2 is less of a problem.

But it could affect future exploration of Mars if simple life has managed to cling on for dear life in Martian rocks or just below the soil. For instance, NASA goes out of its way in choosing rover sites not to place them at a spot where there's even the barest potential for life to exist, just in case bacteria from Earth hitched a ride. But this could also hamper future Mars exploration efforts for fear of contaminating another ecosystem entirely.

The study, published in Astrobiology, could bolster the case for present life on Mars.

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