Can life from Earth survive on Mars?
Is there life on Mars and can life from Earth survive there? Well, at least microbes, fungi, lichens and mosses can survive under different space conditions. It shows biological experiments from the space station ISS, made by researchers in the international BIOMEX project.
Life on Mars is a research topic that employs many researchers around the world. The international BIOMEX research team (BIOlogy and Mars Experiment) has done a feasibility study on how organisms from Earth can survive under Mars-like conditions. An overview of their results has now been published.
The purpose of the BIOMEX project was to investigate how different biological samples (including different microbes, fungi, lichens, mosses and different biochemical substances and minerals) can survive under different space conditions.
Surprising survival strategies
The research team includes researchers from many countries and space organizations.
The first results have now been published and they have shown that although different types of stress reactions could be observed, several organisms showed surprising survival strategies.
In the long-term project, the researchers first studied the samples in space simulation laboratories on Earth in order to identify the most stress-tolerant organisms. Subsequently, the samples were sent to the International Space Station ISS to be exposed to real space conditions for about 1.5 years, before being sent back to Earth and the various research laboratories for various investigations.
