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Space Fungus Eating Mir (Really)

Posted by Hemos on Mon Oct 02, 2000 10:21 PM
from the the-plague-attacks dept.
Space
dublin writes: "The Boston Globe has a good article about how Mir is being eaten alive by virulent fungi. The fungi, which are found both inside and outside the aging space station, are rampant to the point that a cosmonaut has said, "There were areas you wouldn't want to stick your hand in." NASA reports that some of these fungi can attack and weaken plastics and even metals. "
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[+] Radiation-eating Fungi 192 comments
SEWilco writes "Fungus growths have been found in many extreme environments, including the Chernobyl reactor walls. Some fungi have been found whose growth is enhanced by radiation. I wonder if someone saved samples of the MIR-eating fungi."
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  • The Fungus is among us!

  • Re:Space research should pay off... (Score:3)

    by ^Z (86325) on Monday October 02 2000, @11:50PM (#736765) Homepage Journal
    Organisms that can eat plastic don't know that they're only supposed to eat it in landfills. After 'decomposing landfills completely' they gladly will eat plastic everywhere they find it (including your computer case) %-) Biotechnology should be used accurately, lest it become bio-hazard.

    To make fungi (or bacteria) mutate by using strong radiation, one does not have to use space station; gamma guns, etc, are readily available on the Earth and, AFAIK, are widely used to generate mutations in bacteria. Same applies to vacuum pumps. One has a good chance to find both things in any decent bio lab.

    But the whole story about fungi growing in vaccum seems pretty... err.. fantastic. Fungi spores are known to survive space vacuum and radiation; but live species are known to die at such levels of radiation and such temperature leaps. More, things that get sent to space stations undergo severe decontamination, and it includes steriziation of pretty much everything. (My parents worked at a space launch facility, so I know it not from books only %-)) So it seems quite unprobable for some fungi to come unnoticed to a space station, not to say to proliferate there.
  • Yes, my bad, lactic fermentation is an anaerobic process.

    When the cells are unable to provide enough ATP, they resort to breaking down glucose by glycolysis into pyruvic acid, and then into lactic acid. This process only yields 2 ATP per glucose, but it's very quick. It's much like comparing an internal combustion gasoline powered-engine to solid fuel booster rockets.

    The aerobic process in cell metabolism is respiration, the process of converting oxygen and glucose into water and carbon dioxide by breaking glycolysis down into pyruvic acid, and then into acetic acid. From there, it goes through the Kreb cycle to produce ADP, which is combined with another phosphate to produce ATP. This process takes much longer than fermentation, but is much more efficient.

    Mike

    "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
  • don't forget the chance that the rocket you are on going up to Mir might blow up too.

    This is not particularly dangerous, and actually it happened before (once, as I recall). Soyuz vehicles have an autonomous, very simple and powerful solid fuel rocket right on top of the capsule where cosmonauts are. In case of fire/explosion on launch that rocket detaches the capsule and brings it few kilometers away from the launch pad. This happens very quickly, and accelerations are substantial (like 10+ g) but not unbearable for few seconds.

    The Shuttle never had such system and still doesn't have.

  • I don't know, but whoever wins would do well to bring along plenty of Desenex and Lotrimin...

    Hey! There's the first two sponsors for the program! :-)

    Eric
    --

  • The guy who produced Survivor was supposed to create a show that had folks competing to be launched to Mir.....sort of reminds me of a bad W.C Fields joke....

    First prize is 1 week on Mir
    Second prize is TWO weeks.

  • You're right about the lunar missions, but the Hubble repair mission was done by the space shuttle, which is not designed to go beyond the van Allen radiation belts. Hubble is in the same type of near-Earth orbit that the shuttle takes, not geosynchronous orbit like communication satellites. Remember, the only reason for geosynchronous orbit is to stay stationary above one point on the Earth. Hubble has not these concerns. It's looking the other way!

    Eric
  • Was I the only one who imagined the episode Terminal [ha.md.us] of the classic B-grade scifi TV series Blake's 7?

    - Sam

  • I guess they ran out of Space Tinactin.

  • space fungus.

    - A.P.

    --
    * CmdrTaco is an idiot.

  • Destination MIR? (Score:3)

    by JohnDB (51703) on Monday October 02 2000, @05:28PM (#736795)
    So... Is this going to put a hold on Destination: MIR, or just change it into the competition where an ordinary person gets a chance to be eaten alive by space fungi?

    jdb
  • I meant to put "breaking glucose down by glycolysis," but I got ahead of myself ;)

    Mike

    "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."

  • I wonder if they've really thought about that.

    Certainly! That's why many, if not most, scientists are opposed to sending people to Mars before a rather exhaustive robotic exploration has been done.

  • i suppose those spores aren't an alien life form like the article implies. it sounds far more plausible that the spores have been on the spacecraft before liftoff and mutated into their current form over time. that would explain why they can be related to other fungus found on earth.
    besides, how high is the mir's orbit? i guess chances are that it's well within the (rapidly thinning, but still) earth's atmosphere.

  • I guess this means a manned interstellar journey is out of the question, in the near term, anyway. Such a journey would surely succumb to a choking fungi invasion long before they would reach their destination. Even the slightest mishap with contamination would spell certain doom in a matter of days or weeks. Think of the overloaded air filters trying to scrub out the dead skin cells, the little flecks of snot and spit, food and hair, all of it fit for fungi consumption. A veritable cornucopia, a veritable horn of plenty for spacewort ,as I've taken to refering to it.

    The only surefire means of avoiding this fate, that I can think of, is for such interstellar ships to feature a balanced ecosphere with plants, animals, microbes and insects, co-mingled with the crew quarters and the ship common areas.

    This story offers up pretty solid indication that the risk of fungi infestation aboard long-term spacecraft is very real. The ecosphere ship is the only obvious solution, as mechanical filtering and sanitization services are almost garunteed failure at some point. I'll be certain to point all this out to any Hollywood writer-types I bump in to.

  • Yeasts are funguses. Specifically, they're monocellular funguses.
  • These fungi are hereby ordered to cease and desist their attack on Mir, on account of breaking Intergalactic copyright, to wit:

    • Blake's 7, season 3 finale
    • Quatermas I

    Failure to stop this action will result in orders from Comissioner Sleer (a-la Servalan) to wipe out all organic life in a 3 million spacial radius.

  • There simply is no (none) known way to completely sterilize anything on earth. Every attack against bacteria (and fungus) gives good results- up to a point.

    You use soap. Antibiotics. Radiation. Ultrasound. You use vacuum. Use water and pressure. You curse them and you kill 99.9999% of them. It never matters. They survive, and they come back, and multiply again.

    Quite simply, the entire Earth is completely infected with bacteria. Wherever there is a exothermic reaction on earth, they are there. Every dust partical large enough to support one has one. Every drop of water, every grain of dirt has them in abundance. All animals are covered in bacteria. Hint: you don't use soap against dirt, you use it against bacteria in dirt.

    Yes we need them to survive, but we don't like that, and we don't like them. But, even in conditions which no animal can survive, like vacuum, they still infect and eat and reproduce and sometimes freeze dry to wait for water to come alive again.

    The lesson here is: we are dirty, we are infected, and we always will be. Everything we build, every place we put it, every time we do it, will never be ours alone.

    -Ben
  • Will this ever stop? Just two articles down, doesn't it say:

    Red Space Station Infested With Bugs?
  • Well, we've got an Earth environment in orbit. But it's an environment that is not balanced. We need to add things that eat fungus, and things that eat those things, and things that eat those things that eat the fungus... but none of them should eat wires...
  • Why don't you pour some into a fish tank and then ask the fish?

  • (they don't take showers, for example)

    Actually they do. Space station != shuttle.

  • This fungi could be put into good use! It can be used to clear space junk..

    Eg. A small space scarft could home in on pieces of space junk, and spray it with the fungus colture.. In a few weeks time, the space junk gets eaten, and our astronauts / cosmonuts are safer :)
  • In the 1970's the USSR placed on mars a probe that contained a piece of paper with the signature of Leonid Bhreznev on it. Do you really think they sterilized it?

    I'm just reading KenMcLeod's "The Sky Road" and it has a the amusing reflection that scientists arrive on mars to find it is being very slowly
    terraformed by microbes descended from Leonid Bhreznev's sweat.
  • Water is recycled, waste is placed in used cargo ships and burned with them in the atmosphere.
  • "I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

    Hmm.
  • First, "Red Hat Linux 7 Infested With Bugs", and now, "Space Fungus Eating Mir". Anyone see a pattern here?

    I'm half-anxious and half-afraid to hear what bizarre disaster is going to happen next. Watch out, someone might DDoS some Russian servers in Siberia and send some nukes coming our way! Be prepared, if there's something that history has taught us, it's the fact that sh*t happens.

  • This seems like an all-to-appropriate metaphor for our planet's decaying interest in space exploration. Thirty years ago we were racing to put a man on the moon. Now we're racing to...um, watch our spacestation get eaten by mold because there isn't any such thing as an astronaut janitor.

    *sigh*
  • Decades of science fiction notwithstanding, it now seems the great threat to space exploration comes not from technologically advanced alien races, but from the same lowly fungi that attack dorm-room refrigerators.

    AHHHHHH!!! If this fungus is anything like the one that was in _MY_ dorm-room refrigerator, they need to abandon ship and send it to crash into Jupiter or Uranus! Towards the end I didn't even open the fridge. I threw the whole thing away. I shudder to think of what it looked like by that time. SHUDDER

    Steven

  • Re:Amazing... life goes on... literally (Score:5)

    by Flounder (42112) on Monday October 02 2000, @05:30PM (#736876)
    it'll be interesting to see if they find a variety that lives (or at least survives) in a vacuum.

    Ever been to a Star Trek convention?

  • Well, one really good reason is so if we *find* Martian life, we'll be pretty sure that it is from Mars, or at least got there from ancient impacts with Earth and didn't tag along on the last space flight. This is why NASA doesn't want Gallileo to crash into Europa (or whichever moon they think has a chance of life).
  • Grgory Benford and David Brin wrote a book entitled Heart of the Comet where a mission to land on Halley's Comet gets vigorously affected by nothing less than a space-borne purple "fungus."

    In the novel, it turns out to be a potent force for both danger and salvation.

    If the Gentle Scientists can't beat the fungus, it may be a neat move to try to find ways to make it outright useful.

  • I suggest that the Mir astronauts hunt around their station and look for a plate of rotting meat. That's probably the source of the virulent fungi! The StinkMeat Project [thespark.com] goes where no man has gone before ...

  • You really should bare in mind that the fungus eats the spaceship as food.

    This would end up doing a spaceship -> astronaut food conversion which may not be considered in an entirely positive light by the astronauts.

  • I have no answers, but I do have questions.

    Could this pose a threat to other orbital bodies? At least Mir has residents who could do a bit of cleaning once in a while. Not so, your typical comms satelite. Space could end up looking like my kitchen; full of fuzzy dishes.

    Could we use these fungi to biodegrade all the space junk that has been left daggin' about up there? Let them eat the Iridium network into safe little itty-bitty pieces. I know it's a really long term exercise, but the price is right!

    Could we make fungi the first Lunar or Martian colonists, possibly even paving the way to a long-term, low-cost preliminary terraforming experiment?

    While the fungus itself may not be able to exist in total vacuum, I have NO doubt that its spores could float about for many years until they land on another metal, plastic or even rock substrate. So I suspect it could spread. The onliest thing is, do we let it happen by accident, or do we make some effort to harness it?

  • Heheh, good ants reference from the Simpsons where Homer Simpson crashes into the Ant Farm. ;)

  • I can understand these things growing INSIDE the cabin. Lots of moisture probably, and heat. I read the related article, but is this stuff actually growing OUTSIDE mir? That would be kinda wacky, fungus growing in a complete vaccuum. Maybe there is some sort of CO2 and H20 rich microenvironment just outside of mir that it can use to grow. One thing for sure, to is that there is a LOT of radiation flying around in space. The article points out that it could cause the fungus to mutate into something more virulent. Don't panic though, because I think most all of the mutations would be lethal, especially since it has adapted to live in a weird environment like that. Of course it's that one wacky mutation that slips through that can make something weird happen. But from what i've studied, it takes a pretty freaking long time for random mutations to confer major advances in the way a complex organism lives.
  • I know I saw this. This further lowers my opinion of the major TV networks. NBC, a major American TV network, is trying to cash in on the current so-called "voyeuristic" TV craze by sending someone up to the Mir space station. I think it said it'll happen in 2001 or 2002. I bet they didn't know about the little fungus problem at the time... which further eliminates my non-existant desire to go to Mir.



    Now, if it was a hoax, then I wonder how I saw a commercial for it during the closing ceremony of the Olympics. But it does seem pretty incredible to me that an _American_ company would want to send someone to a floating piece of junk. (No, wait. I said "American." Never mind..)

    Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.

  • This could be a good thing. If a fungus can be cultivated in a vacuum, then can we cultivate other types of plant life in a vacuum. Could this be a source of food for an extended space voyage?
  • I would like to claim prior art on this one so that when "Mission to Mir" comes out this fall, i can sue the fsck out of CBS and never have to work...

    and that means more posts for you guys!

    Bo-nes....we need more anti....bacterial soap!

    Damnit jim, i'm a Doctor not a custodial engineer!!!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

  • Space research should pay off... (Score:5)

    by DeepDarkSky (111382) on Monday October 02 2000, @05:42PM (#736968)
    If they find out if this stuff can eat away plastic, then maybe we can figure out a way to contain them and put them to use to eat away non-decomposable plastic items in landfills - heck, just let them decompose landfills completely.

    Space laboratory for fungus-based pharmaceutical research should also be interesting - after all, with the conditions being really good for mutations, they may discover new drugs created by bacteria sooner.

    The only downsides are that if these mutated bacteria/fungi turn out to be deadly and highly contagious and gets back to earth, it could spell doom for humanity. You could just see Hollywood jump on this kind of story to make the next doom-gloom movie, Armageddon and its ilk.

  • HAIL FUNGUS! (Score:4)

    by Johnny Starrock (227040) on Monday October 02 2000, @05:45PM (#736976)
    Mir has been taken over, "conquered", if you will by a master race of space fungus. It's difficult to tell if they will consume the cosmonauts or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping it; the space fungus will soon be here.

    And I, for one, welcome our new fungal overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted website, /. can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground moisture caves.

    (appologies to the Simpsons writers, i just couldn't resist..)

    -----------

  • It's not really "space fungus"... (Score:5)

    by Ariston (232656) on Monday October 02 2000, @06:04PM (#736995) Homepage
    "The fungi that did the damage, Novikova said, included members of the genera Aspergillus, Penicillium, and Cladesporium - all very common on Earth."

    Sounds to me like the stuff was on the station before it ever got into space. Like FreeMars said, there's nothing in the article that mentions any fungus growing outside the station.
    (still, wouldn't it be a little disappointing if the first "attack" by an extraterrestrial organism was a fungus?) ;-)

  • Of course! (Score:5)

    by dizee (143832) on Monday October 02 2000, @06:09PM (#737000) Homepage
    Aerobic bacteria require oxygen to live.
    Anaerobic bacteria thrive in the absence of oxygen.

    The most notable anaerobic process is probably alcoholic fermentation, in which yeast (an anaerobic bacterium) converts sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If you've ever been anywhere where they make alcohol, such as the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, TN (I live down the road from it!), and leaned over the vats very far, you can't breathe because of the massive amounts of carbon dioxide produced by the fermentation process. Not to mention it smells terrible.

    Probably the most familiar aerobic fermentation is lactic fermentation, which occurs within muscle tissue (as well as other places, like milk, yuck!). A saccharine (such as glucose) is converted into lactic acid, which builds up in the muscle tissue as oxygen is supplied during excercise. It is this build-up of lactic acid that causes muscles to be sore after exercise.

    So, yes, this form of life can live in a vacuum. If they break down plastics and metals, I wonder what type of chemical reaction takes place, what type of fermentation is going on. It may be possible to use the byproducts of this fermentations to our advantage.

    Mike

    "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."

  • Re:An embarassing metaphor... (Score:3)

    by DrEldarion (114072) on Monday October 02 2000, @06:44PM (#737005) Homepage
    because there isn't any such thing as an astronaut janitor.

    What?! There sure is! Haven't you played Space Quest?!

    Roger Wilco...

    -- Dr. Eldarion --
  • Immagine being able to buy a little plastic bubble of it for your kids "Super whacky space fungus" ...

    on the serious side, I don't think ths is the first time something like this has happened, I seem to recall a strain of yeast had mutated and was able to metabolize the plastic bags it was sold in. Yeast is pretty advanced stuff -- it can skip from aerobic to anerobic resperation (with oxygen / without oxygen) in a few minutes. (this is how beer produces yeast in a beer bottle with no oxygen) ... if yeast can do that, who knows what fungus can do!

  • Breaking news (Score:3)

    by gad_zuki! (70830) on Monday October 02 2000, @06:51PM (#737017)
    Rumors of a secret Siberian launch containing only 16oz of Desenex anti-fungal cream confirms earlier rumors of all this getting started with a bad case of Jock Itch. Much speculation has been focused on the Russian personal hygiene regimine and funding problems associated with finding the solution to the infamous "Sweaty space shorts."

  • Much broader implications for exobiology (Score:4)

    by Lish (95509) on Monday October 02 2000, @06:53PM (#737018)
    This pretty much refutes the past assertion among the space community that space is too hostile (radiation, extreme heat & cold) to support microbial/fungal life. If fungi, bacteria, etc can survive (thrive!) on the exterior of Mir, why not on Mars? Are the environments really all that different?

    This has two separate but related implications on the search for microbial life (live, remains, fossils) on Mars. First, it opens the possibility that some area of Mars that we haven't explored closely (ie, a lot) may contain evidence of past/present life. Second, what if a probe (or people, someday) sent to Mars isn't properly sterile, and we expose the surface to mold/bacteria from Earth? That would confuse and cast doubt on any findings regarding Mars' biology. Suppose we did find evidence of mold on Mars. How do we know it originated there, and didn't just hitch a ride from Earth?

    I wonder if they've really thought about that.

  • ...send... more... paramedics...

  • Useful link (Score:5)

    by Lish (95509) on Monday October 02 2000, @07:24PM (#737048)
    Here's a link to the original space.com story:
    Space Fungus: A Menace to Orbital Habitats [space.com]
    with pictures of damage. Also somewhat more informative.

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