When you look at the Moon at night, a "water bear" may be looking at you from there! No, no life has been discovered on the Moon yet. Several thousand of the tiny creatures on Earth were sent there. This washing machine-sized object was designed as the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon. Name: Beresheet. Means "beginning" in Hebrew. Its aim was indeed to make a start. It started as a special vehicle developed by 3 Israeli engineers, not by a country's space agency, will land on the Moon, where only the USA, Russia, and China have been able to land a spacecraft successfully until now. And because of the passengers it carries. A digitized library of 30 million pages providing information about humanity and, human DNA samples. As well as thousands of tardigrades were placed on this spacecraft. The tardigrade is a small animal. They range in size from half an mm to 1.5 mm/ 0.019 to 0.059 inches, so slightly thicker than a credit card. It has a cylindrical body, a head that can move independently, and even eyes. Using their 8 legs with claws, they crawl around slowly. The word “Tardigrada” already means “slow walker” in Latin, but it is also known as “water bear” because the German zoologist who discovered it in 1773 thought it looks like a tiny bear. And they do look just as cute as a stuffed bear that shrank down, and turned into a toy; you feel like you need to tickle and hug it :)In that first private spacecraft, which started maneuvers to land on the Moon on April 11, 2019, there were these cute little passengers, as besides a backup of the information about the Earth and people. But just as it descended, it lost contact with the Earth, and seconds before the planned landing, the spacecraft crashed into the lunar surface and shattered. The project had failed. Satellite photos of the impact crater formed in the area where the landing was planned 11 days later also documented this failure. But what happened to those passengers inside? I wonder if those tiny tardigrades that won our hearts with their cute images were dead? Now let me tell you the most important feature of these creatures, apart from being small and cute: They are the most resilient animals known. They are able to withstand extreme conditions that are deadly to other creatures. For example, you can boil them in water, because they can live at 150°C/ 302°F. You can freeze them in the refrigerator because they can survive at -272°C/-457.6°F. Do you know what this means? It means surviving in a condition close to "absolute zero", that is, -273,15 °C/-459,67°F, which is considered the lowest temperature in the universe. In other words, they can not only survive on all 7 continents on Earth, including Antarctica - on top of Everest, the highest peak on land, or in the Mariana trench, the deepest point in the seas - they can even continue to survive in the vacuum of space too.
And how do we know this? Because they were both sent to the International Space Station before and stayed in space for 12 days in the Earth's low orbit, where they were placed in a special capsule. Exposed not only to extreme heat and cold but also to high radiation, 68% of the 3000 water bears continued to lay eggs and reproduce in a healthy way after returning to Earth. Thus, they gained the title of "being the first and for now the only animal resistant to space without a protective suit or shield "
So how do they achieve this? In fact, another bear-like feature of them is that they can hibernate in a way. They can go into a cryptobiotic state called "tun". From such a state, where they become almost dead, they can return to their normal state and begin to move after decades of starvation and thirst. Want an example? Here you go… This little one you see was found in Antarctica. After being in a "tun" state without eating or drinking anything for 30 years, here, while getting back to its normal state, it slowly moves its 4th leg on the first day. On the 6th day, it starts to move its whole body. On the 13th day, it eats the surrounding algae and has a nice feast, and on the 22nd day, it produces 3 eggs in its body. It will then produce 19 more eggs. After 30 years of being almost dead, within 30 days it becomes a family guy with children and starts to wander around cheerfully. We are talking about such resilient animals that we should not be surprised by scientists wanting to use them for space-related research.
In 2011, Italian scientists placed a tardigrade to conduct another experiment on the last space shuttle mission. Their findings, they explained, were that "microgravity and cosmic radiation do not significantly affect tardigrade survival in space travel, and therefore tardigrades could be a very useful animal for space exploration."
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