Did Israelis Just Put Life On The Moon – By Mistake?
Tardigrade Image by iStock
By Benjamin Gladstone August 6, 2019
A botched Israeli mission may have just introduced an incredibly resilient lifeform to the moon, Wired reported Monday.
The lunar lander Beresheet, which would have been the first private spacecraft to touch down softly on the moon, instead crashed on the surface in April. When it did, it dumped its contents, including a “lunar library” that contained everything from human DNA samples to thousands of tardigrades.
Tardigrades are “micro-animals” – microscopic, eight-legged creatures of the animal kingdom. Also known as “water bears,” tardigrades are famous for their ability to survive in extreme conditions, including outer space. They can also live for years without water.
With the crash of Beresheet, the tardigrades are believed to have escaped the lunar module onto the moon’s surface.
Beresheet’s mission was a collaboration between the Israeli government-supported nonprofit SpaceIL and the Los Angeles-based Arch Mission Foundation, which maintains digital “libraries” for the purpose of “preserving the knowledge and biology of our planet.”
After the crash on April 11, the BBC quoted project originator Morris Kahn as saying that “the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous; I think we can be proud.” In May, the Israel Space Agency committed funding to SpaceIL’s next attempt at landing a spacecraft on the moon.
Benjamin Gladstone is an intern at the Forward. Contact him by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @bensgladstone
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
