The Beresheet spacecraft landing may have covered thousands of water bear beetles on the Earth’s natural surface.
According to Inverse, in April 2019, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet landed on the moon, carrying thousands of water bear beetles. Scientists believe that they may have spread and dispersed throughout this celestial body.
Beresheet brought with him a number of articles, including information discs about life on Earth signed by the nonprofit The Arch Mission. The disk stack contains 30 million pages of information about Earth, a full copy of English Wikipedia, human DNA samples, and thousands of water bugs.
Water bear beetles are microscopic animals. When transported to the Moon, insects are in a state where they stop metabolizing matter, leaving them dehydrated and almost freezing their bodies. If they are rehydrated, they will “come alive”, revealing a lot of information to future Moon explorers.
However, the Beresheet did not land as planned, instead crashing into the natural surface of the Earth satellite and losing contact with the control center on Earth.
Despite the impact in space, scientists believe that if anything remained intact after the crash, it could be aquatic bear insects. The microorganisms are sandwiched between sheets of nickel several micrometers thick and suspended in epoxy – a jelly-like resin-like preservative capable of creating landing zones for them.
In fact, water bears have been shown to survive the harsh conditions of space through previous experiments.
In September 2007, two species of water beetles that were also in a state of decay were exposed to the vacuum of space, to solar radiation aboard NASA’s Foton-M3. After returning to Earth and rehydrating, these insects continued to survive as if nothing had happened.
However, it is possible that if they hang on the surface of the Moon, the water bear may not be able to survive due to the difficulty in finding water.
