According to a new study, the International Space Station may be too sterile – astronauts on board may benefit a little from it.
Astronauts often experience immunity problems, skin diseases and other conditions when they spend their time on the International Space Station.
This may be because the site’s microbial array is much smaller, a new study suggests.
Those surrounding microorganisms are often carried by humans. Therefore, researchers suggest that astronauts “staining” the space station may have some benefits.
They compared it to the benefits of gardening, which have been well demonstrated to strengthen the immune system of those who do so.
“There is a big difference between exposure to healthy soil from gardening and soil stewed in our own filth, if we are in a strictly enclosed environment without making inputs from these healthy microbial sources from the outside,” UC San Diego said in a statement.
In this study, scientists worked with astronauts to wipe 803 different surfaces on the space station. This is about 100 times the sample collected in previous similar investigations.
The researchers then created a 3D map to show where the swabs are located, the microorganisms displayed, and how they interact with the chemicals there.
They found that most of the microorganisms come from human skin. Cleaning chemicals were also found throughout the station.
They found that microbial collections tend to be much more diverse than the Earth and are most similar to other highly sterile environments such as hospitals.
This work describes in a new paper that “the International Space Station has a unique and extreme microbial and chemical environment driven by usage patterns”, published in the Journal cell.
