"The tardigrade conquest of the solar system has begun."

In April, the lunar lander Beresheet — a privately funded Israeli project — crashed on the moon. The mission originally started as a contender for the Google Lunar X prize, a contest to land a privately made robot on the moon before a 2018 deadline. As The Verge’s Loren Grush explains, it wasn’t a very robust scientific mission: It had planned to run some simple tests on the moon’s magnetism. The mission was more a proof of concept that ambitious space exploration can take place outside of big government programs.

Sadly, the craft crash-landed due to a computer error.

But a part of the mission lives on. A group called the Arch Mission Foundation had installed a library of sorts on the craft, and they tell Wired, they believe it may have survived. Arch Mission has the goal of “maintaining a backup of planet Earth,” and wanted a store of information on the moon “to preserve the records of our civilization for up to billions of years.” In the future, after our extinction, if aliens were to land on the moon and find the archive, they could learn about us (and presumably feel sorry we’re no longer around).

The “library” was etched on to a nickel-metal disc, and it contained nearly all of English Wikipedia, copies of classic books, human blood samples, and tardigrades (because if anything alive on Earth is going to last billions of years, it’s them). Many of those tardigrades are coated in a protective resin, much like how amber preserves long-dead mosquitos that were once trapped in tree sap.

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Tardigrades - often called water bears - are creatures under a millimetre long that can survive being heated to 150C and frozen to almost absolute zero.

They were travelling on an Israeli spacecraft that crash-landed on the moon in April.

And the co-founder of the organisation that put them there thinks they're almost definitely still alive.

The water bears had been dehydrated to place them in suspended animation and then encased in artificial amber.

"We believe the chances of survival for the tardigrades... are extremely high," Arch Mission Foundation boss Nova Spivack said....

When dried out they retract their heads and their eight legs, shrivel into a tiny ball, and enter a deep state of suspended animation that closely resembles death.

They shed almost all of the water in their body and their metabolism slows to 0.01% of the normal rate.

And if reintroduced to water decades later, they're able to reanimate.

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The Israeli Beresheet probe was meant to be the first private lander to touch down on the moon. And all was going smoothly until mission controllers lost contact in April as the robotic craft made its way down. Beyond all the technology that was lost in the crash, Beresheet had an unusual cargo: a few thousand tiny tardigrades, the toughest animals on Earth. ...

Because the moon is considered lifeless, Nasa’s office of planetary protection does not frown on missions that spill Earthly organisms on its surface. After all, the Apollo astronauts left behind their own microbes in the 96 bags of human waste that await some future cleaner on the moon. Had the spacecraft spilled its living cargo on Mars, the story might be very different.

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we know that nature has been busy cross-contaminating worlds for the past 4 billion years. And hardy little critters like tardigrades have likely already been deposited far beyond the Earth.

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