NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi. Typical cleanroom protocols, which include “bunny suits” for engineers and 50+ hour baths in 110℃ temperatures (known as Dry-Heat Microbial Reduction, DHMR), are designed to kill bacteria. Specifically, to kill strains of the Bacillus genus, thought to be the toughest bacteria to kill. The thought process was simple - if you could kill Bacillus you could kill everything else.…