NASA found fungal strains that survive even its most stringent sterilization efforts, suggesting Earth microbes may already be living on Mars. <\/p>\n
When exploring worlds which could plausibly harbor life \u2014 Enceladus, Europa, Mars, Titan \u2014 space agencies employ protocols to prevent Earth-based microbes contaminating any biology elsewhere. <\/p>\n
The existence of near-unkillable fungi makes future Mars rover missions more fraught and past ones potential seeds of terrestrial life on the red planet<\/a>. Titan may likewise be compromised: When visited by the Cassini-Huygens orbiter in 2004, no one realized Saturn\u2019s moon had liquid oceans and was thus a promising candidate for life, so the probe was not fully sterilized. The little spacecraft \u201cmight be seeding life<\/a>,\u201d a mission scientist told Flagship\u2019s Tom in 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA found fungal strains that survive even its most stringent sterilization efforts, suggesting Earth microbes may already be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-430384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}