Water Bears on the Moon - A Matter of Concern?

摘要

The first successful mission to moon was achieved by USSR when it achieved a soft landing of an unmanned spacecraft, Luna 9, on the moon in 1966. This was followed by similar successful soft landings of unmanned spacecrafts on moon by USA (on the ocean of storms by Surveyor 1 on June 2, 1966) and China (on the far side of moon by Chang'e 4 on January 3, 2019). In a privately funded project, the Israeli Space Agency, SpaceIL, launched on February 22, 2019 an uncrewed spacecraft, Beresheet, from Cape Canaveral, Florida for its soft landing on moon. But the mission failed because Beresheet crashed on moon on April 11. Pertinently, this failure marks the first crash of spacecraft on moon after 48 years of the last crash - that of the Russian spacecraft Luna 18 on lunar mountains near the edge of Mare Fecunditatis in 1971.