What’s the point of this article? It cites a paper from 2007 and references another paper from 2010. It’s an interesting factoid, but very dated information and the article adds nothing by way of journalism.
it's already known tardigrades can survive on the surface of space ships, but with an important caveat: they need to already be in the "tun" state, which is a dessicated husk that is metabolically inactive.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
although I guess the lichen results predate the tardigrade results.
Once we have established with high confidence that other planets don’t have native life, We can start looking for life forms which can survive natural environment. Imagine we seed Venus with life. ;)
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[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadI was kinda hoping tardigrades would be involved but lichen would have been my second guess.
Most likely to attract advertising dollars and pad the income of the guardian with interesting information