Mosses are among Earth’s greatest habitability creators, turning barren rock into fertile soil, and now a team of scientists suggests that these non-vascular plants could do the same on Mars. Another question value We need to introduce life from Earth to our red neighbor – something we are not very good at on our own planet.

However if Earth ecologist Xiaoshuang Li and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a candidate they think should do the trick. The Earth’s surface was once extremely inhospitable to life, but that didn’t stop a group of organisms called bryozoans, which today include mosses, liverworts, and hornworts, from escaping the fertile safety of the oceans in search of new horizons.

The success of these terrestrial pioneers depended on their ability to use and digest nutrients that seeped from or flowed through rocks, while surviving in extremely hostile conditions that would have reduced other living things to dust. But as they spread across Earth’s rocky frontier, they created soils that gradually paved the way for other, less hardy life forms to set foot on land.

This genetic ingenuity continues to serve mosses worldwide, and researchers believe we could use their innate abilities to colonize Mars and lay the foundation for other, less sustainable life forms, such as crops.

Unlike the fleshy forest mosses you might imagine, which are much easier to grow than their ancestors, Syntrichia caninervis It strives to live an extremely frugal lifestyle. It grows in the deserts of China and the United States, as well as in the icy mountains of the Pamir Mountains, Tibet, the Middle East, Antarctica, and the circumpolar regions.

The Gurbantunggut desert in northwestern China is a hotbed S. caninervisDespite temperatures ranging from -40 °C to 65 °C (-40 °F to 149 °F) and relative humidity dropping to 1.4 percent, it grows more densely here than anywhere else in the world.

Lee and his colleagues tested this algae and pushed it out. S. caninervis It is not easy to get out of one’s extremely wide comfort zone.

In the laboratory, they tested the plant’s response to severe dehydration, long-term freezing (-80°C for 3 or 5 years and -196°C for 15 or 30 days), radiation (at doses ranging from 500 to 16,000 Gy), and Mars-like conditions at the Center for Planetary Atmosphere Simulation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (PASF).

During the simulation on Mars, plants were exposed to a pressure of about 650 pascals (Pa), similar to 680–790 Pa on Mars. The temperature was -60°C at night and 20°C during the day, equivalent to conditions on the equator and mid-latitude regions of Mars. They also modeled the gas composition of the atmosphere and UV radiation levels to be closer to those on Mars.

For S. caninervis dehydration was a walk in the park. And he shrugged in the severe frost. All frozen plants revived after thawing; plants that were dehydrated before freezing recovered much faster than their wet counterparts. Faced with 50 Gy of radiation levels that could kill humans, S. caninervis He didn’t blink. At 500 Gy, his growth accelerated even more.

The mosses that were dehydrated and then exposed to Martian conditions were able to act as if nothing had ever happened after just 30 days of recovery. Their hydrated counterparts took a bit longer to recover, but still survived to tell the tale.

“Although we still have a long way to go to create self-sustaining habitats on other planets, we have demonstrated great potential.” S. caninervis as a pioneer plant for growth on Mars” – the researchers write.

“Looking into the future, we expect to deliver this promising moss to Mars or the Moon to further test the possibility of colonization and plant growth in space.”

Even if moss on Mars turns out to be a terrible idea, S. caninervis Being able to transform a completely dry land into a “living skin” even after surviving such extreme conditions gives some hope for life on our planet, which sometimes seems more sustainable than we think. This study was published on: Innovation.