Mold grows on the International Space Station on a panel where exercise clothes were hung to dry.
Credit: NASA
Posted on 06/28/2019 5:48:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Astronauts on the ISS spend hours every week cleaning the inside of the station's walls to prevent mold from becoming a health problem.
Spores of the two most common types of mold on the ISS, Aspergillus and Pennicillium, survive X-ray exposure at 200 times the dose that would kill a human, according to Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, who will present the new research Friday at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019).
Pennicillium and Aspergillus species are not usually harmful, but inhaling their spores in large amounts can sicken people with weakened immune systems. Mold spores can withstand extreme temperatures, ultraviolet light, chemicals and dry conditions. This resiliency makes them hard to kill.
But fungi aren't all bad. Cortesão investigates fungal species' capacity to grow in the conditions of space with the aim of harnessing the microorganisms as biological factories for materials people might need on long space voyages. ...Their cells have complex inner structures, like ours, with the cellular equipment needed to build polymers, food, vitamins and other useful molecules astronauts may need on extended trips beyond Earth.
...Ionizing radiation kills cells by damaging their DNA and other essential cellular infrastructure.
The spores survived exposure to X-rays up to 1000 gray, exposure to heavy ions at 500 gray and exposure to ultraviolet light up to 3000 joules per meter squared.
Gray is a measure of absorbed dose of ionizing radiation, or joules of radiation energy per kilogram of tissue. Five gray is enough to kill a person. Half a gray is the threshold for radiation sickness.
A 180-day voyage to Mars is expected to expose spacecraft and their passengers to a cumulative dose of about 0.7 gray. Aspergillus spores would be expected to easily survive this bombardment.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger.
Sounds like the plot line of about a dozen sci-fi movies. While attempting to eradicate common mold using ionizing radiation, something really bad happens. Next thing you know you've got zombies in space, or some such.
Just need to carry dehydrated blue Cheese dressing and have a salad.
Bring it home so we may all enjoy it.
Nothing a little bleach , salt and copper sulfate can’t cure.
Its gotta smell like roses, everyone drinking and sweating out urine 24/7. Who brought the sour kraut?
For female astronauts the result will be an incurable yeast infection.
I once took a mini course in radiation. One of the topics at the time was how safe was ultrasonic radiation, as measured in mW/cm2 on humans.
Perhaps they should try that physical energy amp’d up for spores?
Yeah, and they’re going to bring that nasty stuff back to Earth with them. Imagine cleaning a shower stall with that crap buried in the grout lines.
“Honey...we’re gonna need a bigger flamethrower.”
Remember Mir spreading its nasty stuff over and in the Pacific?
Nuke it **IN** orbit.
It’s the only way to be SURE. . .
Talk about an itch...
“Remember Mir...”
I had to look that up...per Wiki:
“In the 1990s samples of extremophile moulds were taken from Mir. Ninety species of micro-organisms were found in 1990, four years after the station’s launch. By the time of its decommission in 2001, the number of known different micro-organisms had grown to 140. As space stations get older, the problems with contamination get worse.[44] Moulds that develop aboard space stations can produce acids that degrade metal, glass and rubber.[45] The moulds in Mir were found growing behind panels and inside air-conditioning equipment. The moulds also caused a foul smell, which was often cited as visitors’ strongest impressions.”
I think I’ll just settle for the good old-fashioned black mold on my basement walls.
Aspergillis does sound like something millennials would order in a restaurant.
Humans don’t/can’t live in a completely sterile environment. Instead of fighting this, future space stations need to be biospheres where it is accepted that there will be as much living things as an Earth building.
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