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":416607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-416606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}