Bears on the Moon, Musk Vs. Bezos, and How Venus Became Hell in Space

A version of this first appeared as the TIME Space newsletter sent on Aug. 10. There are now bears on the moon. No, really. They’re tiny bears—barely half a millimeter in length—but they’re there. And oh yeah, they may be alive. The bears in question are actually tardigrades—a little like worms, a little like insects, with a fat, segmented body, and eight legs ending in tiny claws. Discovered in 1773 by a German zoologist who nicknamed them kleiner Wasserbär, or “little water bear,” they are found pretty much everywhere on Earth because they can live pretty much anywhere. They’re able to survive temperatures as low as -200°C (-328°F) and as high as 150°C (about 300°F). They shrug off radiation that would kill just about any other animal and can survive for years—perhaps decades—without water, shriveling into a dry, organic fleck, and able to live anew once they’re rehydrated. In February, when Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft was launched to the moon, it carried not only scientific instruments, but a digital library of 30 million pages of information, samples of human DNA and a colony of thousands of tardigrades. Beresheet didn’t quite make it, crashing on the moon on April 11. But the spacecraft’s designers last week announced that they believe the library, the DNA, and the tardigrades may have survived. The temperature on the moon vacillates from paralyzingly c...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Space Source Type: news