Humankind may have set foot on the moon just over 50 years ago, but there’s not exactly a thriving ecosystem of living organisms.

NASA considers the moon lifeless, and fair enough, really – it has less atmosphere than Old Trafford when Manchester United go a goal behind early on.

Just trying to inject a little humour, relax.

Earlier this year, the Israeli Beresheet probe was meant to be the first private lander to touch down on the moon. That didn’t exactly go to plan, and the spacecraft crash-landed on the moon.

Not at all ideal, but there may be an interesting and unexpected byproduct of the crash. The Guardian reports:

Beyond all the technology that was lost in the crash, Beresheet had an unusual cargo: a few thousand tiny tardigrades, the toughest animals on Earth.

…“Our payload may be the only surviving thing from that mission,” Nova Spivack, the organisation’s founder, told Wired magazine.

Tardigrades have fascinated scientists since their discovery in the 18th century by the German zoologist and pastor Johann August Ephraim Goeze. The millimetre-long animals, sometimes known as water bears or moss piglets after their favoured environment and food, resemble cheerful eight-legged maggots wearing distinctly sphincter-like faces.

Bit harsh to compare their faces to sphincters. Should have stopped at moss piglets.

Let’s get in close:

OK, I see it now.

So what makes these animals so bloody hardy?

They have been found on mountain tops, in scorching deserts, and lurking in subglacial lakes in Antarctica. In his book The Hidden Powers of Animals, Dr Karl Shuker claimed the beasts survived being frozen in liquid helium and being boiled at 149C.

The tardigrade’s secret is the ability to shrivel into a seed-like pod, expelling nearly all of its water and slashing its metabolism. In this “tun” state, the animals can hunker down and survive conditions that would normally be swiftly fatal. In 2007, scientists discovered that inactive tardigrades are so tough they can survive the harsh radiation and frigid vacuum of space travel.

And so it came to be that there is life on the moon, probably. Lukasz Kaczmarek, a tardigrade expert and astrobiologist at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, said the animals may well have survived the crash landing. “Tardigrades can survive pressures that are comparable to those created when asteroids strike Earth, so a small crash like this is nothing to them,” he said. The animals could potentially survive on the moon for years, he added.

Their ability to survive is obviously rather impressive, but Kaczmarek wants to take things even further:

Kaczmarek is exploring whether the ageing process itself grinds to a halt in dormant tardigrades, through what he calls a Sleeping Beauty model. He said it appears that a tardigrade that enters a tun state at one month old emerges with the same biological age when it is revived a decade later.

“It is really amazing,” he said. “It may be that we can use this in the future if we plan missions to different planets, because we will need to be young when we get there.”

From sphincter-face to possibly holding the key to interplanetary space exploration, hey – the humble tardigrade strikes back.

As mentioned before, NASA does consider the moon lifeless, and some in the scientific community have raised concerns about this latest development.

Here’s the BBC:

“What it means is the so-called ‘pristine environment’ of the moon has been broken,” says Open University professor of planetary and space sciences Monica Grady.

When spacecraft leave Earth they are bound by the Outer Space Treaty not to contaminate their environment.

“You might say it was broken in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were there, which is true, but since then we’ve become much more aware of how we should preserve these planetary bodies.

“I don’t think anybody would have got permission to distribute dehydrated tardigrades over the surface of the moon. So it’s not a good thing.”

Still, there’s no reason you shouldn’t look up at the moon tonight and wonder how those little moss piglets are getting on.

Go on with your bad selves.

[sources:guardian&bbc]