Friday, August 16, 2019

The Mashable headline is "How tardigrades were secretly smuggled to the moon", but...

Is there confirmation it actually happened?:
"We didn't tell them we were putting life in this thing," he says. "Space agencies don't like last-minute changes. So we just decided to take the risk ... we did it in a way where there would be absolutely no risk of any contamination outside of our payload, which was sealed and in a vacuum."

...

Spivack was planning to announce the arrival of the tardigrades after the Beresheet landed in April, effectively asking forgiveness rather than permission. Trouble was, the Beresheet didn't so much land as ... crash.

...

In fact, we might never know about the existence of the lunar tardigrades if the Wired reporter had not happened to be doing a piece on Spivack for their college alumni magazine. Spivack couldn't resist casually dropping in the tardigrade part of the story.

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In fact, we still don't have the full story on the space library that crash-landed on the moon. Spivack admits he is still withholding information on the contents of other "vaults" within the tiny space library.

...

"There's music, there's documents we haven't disclosed, there are all sorts of things we haven't disclosed yet," Spivack says. "There are secrets within secrets."

Asked why he was still withholding details, Spivack had a one-word answer: "Fun."
The original Wired article includes this:
This is good news for Spivack, who wants to incorporate more DNA into future libraries on the moon and beyond. This fall, Spivack says the Arch Mission Foundation will be launching a crowdfunding campaign that will solicit DNA samples from volunteers to include on the next moon mission, as well as DNA from endangered species.