{"id":187064,"date":"2024-04-09T16:26:17","date_gmt":"2024-04-09T21:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/could-tardigrades-have-colonized-the-moon"},"modified":"2024-04-09T16:26:17","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T21:26:17","slug":"could-tardigrades-have-colonized-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/could-tardigrades-have-colonized-the-moon","title":{"rendered":"Could Tardigrades Have Colonized The Moon?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/could-tardigrades-have-colonized-the-moon2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>First of all, they have to have survived the impact. <a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/33978458\/\" class=\"\" color=\"accent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Laboratory tests<\/a> have shown that frozen specimens of the Hypsibius dujardini species travelling at 3,000 km\/h in a vacuum were fatally damaged when they smashed into sand. However, they survived impacts of 2,600 km\/h or less \u2013 and their \u201chard landing\u201d on the Moon, unwanted or not, was far slower.<\/p>\n<p>The Moon\u2019s surface is not protected from solar particles and cosmic rays, particularly gamma rays, but here too, the tardigrades would be able to resist. In fact, Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, professor at the University of Kiel in Germany, and his team have shown that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/sciadv.aaz1334\" class=\"\" color=\"accent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">doses of gamma rays hitting the lunar surface were permanent but low<\/a> compared with the doses mentioned above \u2013 10 years\u2019 exposure to Lunar gamma rays would correspond to a total dose of around 1 Gy.<\/p>\n<p>But then there\u2019s the question of \u201clife\u201d on the Moon. The tardigrades would have to withstand a lack of water as well as temperatures ranging from &minus;170 to &minus;190\u00b0C during the lunar night and 100 to 120\u00b0C during the day. A lunar day or night lasts a long time, just under 15 Earth days. The probe itself wasn\u2019t designed to withstand such extremes and even if it hadn\u2019t crashed, it would have ceased all activity after just a few Earth days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, they have to have survived the impact. Laboratory tests have shown that frozen specimens of the Hypsibius dujardini species travelling at 3,000 km\/h in a vacuum were fatally damaged when they smashed into sand. However, they survived impacts of 2,600 km\/h or less \u2013 and their \u201chard landing\u201d on the Moon, unwanted [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-extension","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}