I am no biologist; I am unclear about the terms here.<p>Let say I have a piece of bread that has mold on it.
I leave it alone, the mold grows and consumes more of the bread.
The mold / fungi is "alive" in that it is growing and consuming.<p>Let us say that the fungi here was from moldy bread.
They shoot it into space, stuff it inside the lab and expose it to the
same environment.<p>Does survival then mean that it keeps eating more of the bread while
the experiment is taking place, so when they look at it afterwards
there is a lot more of it? But 40% of it has died?<p>Or does it mean that the cells making up the mold are entirely dormant
but is the DNA structure has remained intact for 60% of the mold and
the hypothesis is that if you brought it back to earth it would start
"being alive", growing, eating again?<p>>The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,”