Moss survived nine months in space outside the ISS before returning to Earth

Without a space suit a human would last seconds outside the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting Earth.

But a smaller and greener plant resident of our planet is a lot hardier.

A handful of moss spores have survived nine months exposed to low-orbit conditions with 80 per cent of them still able to reproduce once back in a lab on the ground.

The results, published in the journal iScience , is the latest in a series of experiments by different scientific groups testing the capabilities of moss species for future space exploration.

That's because moss, which were some of the earliest forms of terrestrial plants on Earth, is one of the toughest oxygen-creating species on the planet.

Senior study author and molecular biologist Tomomichi Fujita, from Hokkaido University, said the st