A Microbial Survival Model for the Permanently Shadowed Regions of the Moon Shows Long-Term Survival of Terrestrial Microbial Contamination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous models of microbial survival on the moon do not directly consider the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). These regions shield their interiors from many of the biocidal factors encountered in space flight, such as UV irradiation and high temperatures, and this shielding reduces the rate at which microbial spores become nonviable. We applied the Lunar Microbial Survival Model (LMS, Schuerger et al., 2019) to the environment found inside PSRs at two craters targeted for exploration by the Artemis missions, Shackleton and Faustini. The model produced rates of reduction of -0.0815 and -0.0683 logs per lunation, respectively, which implies that it would take 30.0 years for Shackleton and 30.8 years for Faustini to accumulate a single Sterility Assurance Level of -12 logs of reduction. The lunar PSRs are therefore one of the least biocidal environments in the solar system and would preserve viable terrestrial microbial contamination for decades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".