Tardigrades are now on the moon thanks to a crashed Israeli spacecraft? | Hacker News Reader

Tardigrades are now on the moon thanks to a crashed Israeli spacecraft?

cnet.com

34 pointsgilad12 comments

Is there are global policy to introducing foreign life to other planets? Can anyone do anything terraforming or specified introduction they want? It is very likely we can introduce single cell organisms to at least a few planets or moons in the solar system and they would take, if not at the surface but maybe underground.

The moon is a category II body, with the only requirement being potential contamination must be documented. This is an area that has been covered by international treaties since the late 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection

Huh? The Wikipedia article you linked puts the moon into

> Unrestricted Category V: “Earth-return missions from bodies deemed by scientific opinion to have no indigenous life forms.”

According that Wikipedia page, COSPAR defined two categorization systems, one for missions, one for celestial bodies.

In their ‘wisdom’, they decided to use Roman numerals I through V for both.

Missions to the moon fall in mission category II, but the moon itself falls in target category V (more precisely unrestricted category V)

Freaking CNET....battling my ad-blockers, not giving up though. I don't even want to see that mess in console. The whole site is just a disaster, slowing to a crawl, as it tries to inject every freaking script known to man on the page.

Looks pretty great to me with javascript disabled.

It wouldn't surprise me if some day we discover they were there before us, anyway.

There probably was alot of things in alot of places before us...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Now any finding of life on the moon is subject to confusion over whether it was actually from this crash.

Yea, well there's also a few dozen bags of astronaut poop on the moon. Might be some bugs in that, too.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/22/18236125/ap...

Reminder: Beresheet means In The Beginning and is the title of the book of Genesis in Hebrew.

Haven't they ever watched Jurassic Park? Life finds a way. Hehehe.

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