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Ultraviolet radiation turned out to be the tardigrades' kryptonite, as few of the creatures survived full exposure to UV light during the ESA experiments. The creatures can remain in this so-called tun state for months and still revive in the presence of water scientists even resuscitated two tardigrades from a 30-year deep freeze in 2016.Īs a tun, a tardigrade can weather boiling, freezing, high pressure and even the vacuum of space, the European Space Agency (ESA) reported in 2008, after sending water bears into orbit. Tardigrades survive conditions that would destroy most other organisms they do so by expelling the water from their bodies and generating compounds that seal and protect the structure of their cells. They make a very thick outer layer of their spore proteins that's known to protect them against dehydration, radiation - a variety of things." Sole survivor "I'd be very surprised if you couldn't culture a few things out of the center of that freeze-dried material," Martin told Live Science. It's possible that even before the Beresheet tardigrades crashed on the moon, other forms of terrestrial microbes were already there: gut bacteria in abandoned bags of astronaut poo, said Mark Martin, an associate professor of biology at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. However, contamination could carry serious consequences for missions to planets where life might yet be found, such as Mars experts suggest that one potential consequence of colonizing Mars could be the extermination of native microbial life through exposure to Earth bacteria. Scientists have yet to find any evidence that the moon ever hosted living organisms (other than visiting astronauts and microbial hitchhikers from Earth) that could be threatened by microscopic invaders. But even though large space agencies typically follow these rules, there is no single entity enforcing them globally, Live Science previously reported. In the decades that followed the treaty, other guidelines were created that acknowledged the risks of seeding other worlds with Earth microbes, and these stipulations outlined practices for sterilizing mission equipment to avoid contamination. Space agencies from around the world follow a decades-old treaty about what is permissible to leave on the moon, and the only explicit prohibitions are against weapons and experiments or tools that could interfere with missions from other agencies, according to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. First of all, is anyone in trouble for accidentally spilling tardigrades on the moon? That's a complicated question, but the short answer is no.
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