![lunar lander lunar lander](https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/images/editoral-stories/thumbnails/6849h.jpg)
Whether this will be enough to bring them back to life, however, remains to be seen. Any lunar tardigrades found by future humans will have to be brought back to Earth or somewhere with an atmosphere in order to rehydrate them. As for whether any of the DNA or tardigrades are still intact, that’s anyone’s guess, but Spivack says there’s no reason to worry about water bears taking over the moon. But Spivack says that even if the library broke into pieces, their analysis shows that these fragments would be large enough to retrieve most of the analog information in the first four layers. In the best-case scenario, Beresheet ejected the Arch Mission Foundation’s lunar library during impact and it lies in one piece somewhere near the crash site. “Ironically, our payload may be the only surviving thing from that mission,” Spivack says. Moreover, Spivack says that the heat generated by the impact wasn’t high enough to melt the nickel layers, which were themselves encased in several protective layers to block radiation. The resin layers added a significant amount of strength to the lunar library, which made it less likely to break apart upon impact. In retrospect, however, it may have been what saved the library from destruction. Spivack says that adding the DNA-filled resin to the lunar library at the last minute was a major risk, because any mistakes in how it was incorporated could have ruined the nickel engravings. It’s conceivable that as we learn more about tardigrades, we’ll discover ways to rehydrate them after much longer periods of dormancy. Although the lunar library is designed to last for millions of years, scientists are just beginning to understand how tardigrades manage to survive in so many unforgiving environments. Scientists have revived tardigrades that have spent up to 10 years in this dehydrated state, although in some cases they may be able to survive much longer without water. Tardigrades are known to enter dormant states in which all metabolic processes stop and the water in their cells is replaced by a protein that effectively turns the cells into glass. The promising thing about the tardigrades, says Spivack, is that they could hypothetically be revived in the future. A few thousand extra dehydrated tardigrades were sprinkled onto tape that was attached to the lunar library. Into the resin they tucked hair follicles and blood samples from Spivack and 24 others that he says represent a diverse genetic cross-section of human ancestry, in addition to some dehydrated tardigrades and samples from major holy sites, like the Bodhi tree in India. Ha and an engineer on Spivack’s team added a thin layer of epoxy resin between each layer of nickel, a synthetic equivalent of the fossilized tree resin that preserves ancient insects. But a few weeks before Spivack had to deliver the lunar library to the Israelis, however, he decided to include some DNA in the payload anyway. Spivack had planned to send DNA samples to the moon in future versions of the lunar library, not on this mission. The actual lunar library has the center image removed.
Lunar lander archive#
The spacecraft was carrying the foundation’s first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears” that can survive pretty much any environment- including space.īut when the Israelis confirmed Beresheet had been destroyed, Spivack was faced with a distressing question: Did he just smear the toughest animal in the known universe across the surface of the moon?Ī copy of the first layer of the lunar library on the Beresheet lunar lander. As the founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit whose goal is to create “a backup of planet Earth,” Spivack had a lot at stake in the Beresheet mission. Half a world away, Nova Spivack watched a livestream of Beresheet’s mission control from a conference room in Los Angeles. Mission control had lost contact with the spacecraft, and it crashed into the moon shortly thereafter. But only seconds before the scheduled landing, the numbers on the left screen stopped. The right screen featured a crude animation of Beresheet firing its engines as it prepared for a soft landing in the Sea of Serenity. On the left screen was a stream of data being sent back to Earth by Beresheet, its lunar lander, which was about to become the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. It was just before midnight on April 11 and everyone at the Israel Aerospace Industries mission control center in Yehud, Israel, had their eyes fixed on two large projector screens.