Moss can grow pretty much anywhere, whether it be in the freezing Arctic or in the midst of hellishly hot volcanic heat. But there’s one environment scientists have theorized could be moss’s final boss: the cold, dead vacuum of space.
Turns out, according to a new pair of studies published in the journal iScience, moss scoffs at the unforgiving harshness of space and keeps on trucking.
In the airless, radiation-saturated void outside of the International Space Station, researchers tested whether a common moss species known as Physcomitrium patens could survive at all, and if it could, for how long. The answers are yes and probably forever if it wants.
Expectations were low. Many living organisms can’t survive in the cold, airless vacuum of space for even a second. Moss seemed like it wouldn’t stand a chance. Instead, over 80 percent of the moss spores came back to Earth alive a year later, and almost 90 percent of it was still doing all the normal stuff moss does, like germinating. The moss couldn’t care less.
Moss spores appear to have a natural armor in tiny protective casings that evolved roughly 450 million years ago to help early plants colonize Earth’s brutal, barren landscapes. Those same survival tricks apparently work just fine against temperatures swinging from -320°F to 131°F, plus UV bombardment and cosmic radiation.
Tomomichi Fujita, the study’s lead author, thinks moss could last up to 15 years in space, knowledge that could help build future extraterrestrial farms or entire ecosystems on the Moon or Mars. We’ll be terraforming a planet with space moss in the blink of an eye, but understanding the absurd resiliency of common moss is a giant leap for off-world colonies of the distant future.
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