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    "headline": "Chernobyl’s black mold may dim space radiation slightly; ISS sensors logged 147 counts a minute against",
    "description": "The 2018-19 station experiment flew a 0.07-inch layer of Cladosporium sphaerospermum for 26 days; its authors say the sensors could not measure dose and radiosynthesis is unproven.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-27T13:27:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Chernobyl, Fungi, International Space Station, Space radiation",
    "articleBody": "A thin film of black mold grown on the International Space Station sat over a radiation sensor that logged an average of 147 ionizing events per minute, while an identical sensor under bare agar logged 151. That four-count gap, reported in a 2022 paper in Frontiers in Microbiology by Nils Averesch, Graham Shunk and Christoph Kern, is the hard number behind a story now circulating again online: that a fungus linked to Chernobyl was flown to orbit to see whether it could act as a living radiation shield. The species is Cladosporium sphaerospermum, a dematiaceous mold (meaning its cells are packed with dark melanin pigment). The orbital run took place in December 2018 and January 2019, so nothing here is new this week. The record does show how much the experiment proved, and how much it did not. How a 3.9-inch dish spent 26 days on the station The hardware was a sealed module measuring 4 by 4 by 8 inches (about 10 by 10 by 20 cm), built by the Kentucky company Space Tango and funded through the Higher Orbits Foundation’s Go For Launch! program. Inside, a single split Petri dish 3.9 inches (100 mm) across held potato dextrose agar on both halves. Only one half was seeded with the fungus, leaving the other as the control. A small photodiode radiation counter sat under each half. The package rode to the station on SpaceX’s CRS-16 cargo flight, launched on December 5, 2018, and was powered on in the US Destiny laboratory on December 9. Over 622.5 hours the camera took 1,139 photos and each sensor recorded 23,607 readings. The mold covered its half of the dish within two days, forming a layer about 0.07 inch (1.7 mm) thick. Growth came out faster than on the ground: an average rate 1.21 times that of three Earth-based control runs, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 0.37. That matters because a mold which thrives under radiation could, in principle, be grown on site rather than hauled from Earth, and the papers name launch mass as the tightest limit on any shielding plan. Why 4 counts a minute is both interesting and small Run the numbers yourself: 151 minus 147 is 4, and 4 divided by 151 gives roughly 2.6 percent fewer counts under the mold. In an earlier preprint version, posted on bioRxiv, they compared the late stage with the first 19 hours, when the sensors already differed by about 1.53 percent before much fungus existed, and put the attributable reduction at roughly 0.84 percent. Several limits sit under those figures. The flight was a single run with no repeat. The sensors were photodiodes, not dosimeters, so the team could not measure absorbed dose, and the counters respond best to low-energy X-rays and gamma rays near 10 keV. Yet the paper itself notes that around 80 percent of the station’s radiation dose comes from charged particles from galactic cosmic rays and solar storms, which those sensors largely miss. Shielding covered only one face of each sensor. Microgravity could not be separated from radiation as a cause of the faster growth, and the authors also raise a duller explanation: the fungus changed the chemistry of the agar as it fed. The published paper is direct about the bigger claim. “Actual radiosynthesis, however, remains to be shown,” the authors wrote, referring to the idea that the mold turns radiation into usable chemical energy. What a 2007 lab test at 500 times background found The Chernobyl link predates the space flight by decades. A team led by Nelli Zhdanova reported in 2004 that some soil fungi from the exclusion zone grow toward sources of radiation, and melanized species have been recorded on the walls of the wrecked reactor itself. Around the plant, radiation runs three to five orders of magnitude above normal background. The lab evidence that radiation can feed such fungi comes mainly from a team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, led by Ekaterina Dadachova. Their 2007 study in PLOS ONE exposed three melanized species, including C. sphaerospermum, to a dose rate of 0.05 milligray per hour, about 500 times background. Melanin that had been irradiated for 40 minutes transferred electrons four times faster than untreated pigment. Melanized Cryptococcus neoformans yeast produced about 2.5 times as many colonies under radiation as unirradiated cells, while a mutant lacking melanin barely changed, at 1.1 times. Even then, the authors only “cautiously suggest” that melanin lets fungi harness radiation for energy. For scale, the US space agency puts astronaut exposures at 50 to 2,000 millisieverts, the unit for biological effect, and says one millisievert equals about 10 chest X-rays. The 2022 paper cites roughly 144 millisieverts a year on the station against about 6.2 a year for a typical person on Earth, a ratio of about 23 to 1. Those numbers frame what a 0.07-inch mold layer can do. The bioRxiv version of the study estimated that a layer of melanized fungal biomass about 7.5 feet (2.3 m) deep would be needed to bring Mars surface radiation down to Earth-like levels, falling to about 3.3 feet (1 m) if melanin were mixed with Martian soil. The authors say the next test should fly real dosimetry, and they list candidate molds for it, including Cladosporium cladosporioides and Wangiella dermatitidis. Further reading Wikipedia: Radiotrophic fungus Averesch, Shunk and Kern (2022), Frontiers in Microbiology Dadachova et al. (2007), PLOS ONE NASA: Why Space Radiation Matters Image: Medmyco, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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