Tardigrades on the Moon
- Elements of Science
- Aug 25, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 1, 2019
August 5, 2019
On April 11, the lunar lander Beresheet attempted to land on the moon to become the world’s first private spacecraft to do so. Unfortunately, communications with the spacecraft was lost shortly before landing, and Beresheet soon crashed on the surface of the moon afterwards. During the beginning of August, author Daniel Oberhaus from WIRED Science[2] wrote an article revealing that the crash not only deposited bits of spacecraft parts but also stranded tiny organisms known as tardigrades on the surface of the moon.
Tardigrades, more commonly known as water bears or moss piglets, are small animals found worldwide; similar in size to certain species of mites, tardigrades are likewise observable only by using a microscope. They are so common that when I did an AP Environmental Science class with several other writers on ElSci, we actually found several of these creatures in a sewage sample that we were inspecting Tardigrades have even appeared in mainstream media; SPOILERS: in Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp, Dr. Hank Pym observed several of these creatures approach his ship as he was making his journey into the Quantum Realm.
What distinguishes these microscopic organisms from other creatures are their resilience: they are able to completely stop their own metabolism in a process called cryptobiosis. This is essentially an extreme form of hibernation! In 2008, New Scientist[3] documented a study revealing some tardigrades in a cryptobiotic state could not only survive open space, but could also reproduce offspring that were healthy. This means that these tardigrades were able to endure a freezing environment that had little to no oxygen while absorbing UV radiation from the sun and cosmic radiation from space full-on (we are fortunately shielded from otherwise lethal doses of UV and cosmic radiation by Earth's ozone layer). Recent studies[4] suggest that their resilience is due to a protein known as Dsup, which helps protect tardigrade DNA. DNA carries genetic information and the disruption of this code, known as a mutation, can potentially impair everyday tardigrade function. It is imperative to protect DNA from as many mutations as possible to minimize the chance of mutations harming an organism’s ability to survive
One goal of the mission was to contribute to a lunar library: Beresheet held a small device that contained items thought to be representative of the human species. For example, this library contains images of many classic books, language primers, and even most of the English Wikipedia! But shortly before the Beresheet launched, scientists decided to additionally include DNA samples of various different ethnicities and several thousand cryptobiotic tardigrades. Recent analysis shows that there is a high chance Beresheet’s lunar library device survived the crash mostly intact--there is now likely several thousand dried up water bears on the moon!
If a future mission to the moon recovers Beresheet’s lunar library, we may be able to recover those tardigrades and examine them. Due to their ability to survive space in prior studies, there could be a good chance that these tardigrades are still alive when we do recover them. Doing further research on the tardigrades abandoned on the moon could lead to further discoveries about what makes tardigrades so hardy, potentially paving the way to scientific innovations inspired by one of Earth’s most resilient organisms.
By Vincent Tse
Works Cited
- Tardigrade on moon cartoon GIF.
- Main source of the tardigrades left on the moon by the Beresheet crash. Date included.
[3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14690-water-bears-are-first-animal-to-survive-space-vacuum/
- Info about the 2008 tardigrade experiments.
- Scientific paper about the protein Dsup.
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