Tardigrades are some of the most complex life forms ever discovered on Earth.Scientists have expressed
Tardigrades facing harsh conditionsenvironment, dry out and curl up into a protective ball called a vat, allowing them to survive until conditions become more favorable again. In doing so, they have been observed to survive at boiling and freezing temperatures, intense radiation, crushing pressures similar to the pressure at the bottom of the sea, and are even capable of traveling into space.
Therefore, tardigrades were considered as candidates for panspermia, a hypothesis that suggests that life canpropagating between planets and moons by means of asteroids.
For their work, the team of scientists frozesamples of tardigrades for 48 hours, causing them to take the form of a protective vat. They then loaded the samples into a nylon casing and fired a light gas pistol into the sand. Impact velocities and shock pressures were measured, and then the tardigrades were collected for examination of the injuries received.
Researchers have identified an upper limit for theirthe survival rate in this scenario is an impact speed of 3240 km / h, which creates a pressure surge of 1.14 gigapascals (GPa). The maximum speed at which 100% of the tardigrades survived was 2621 km / h, while about 60% continued to withstand impacts up to 2970 km / h.
The team noticed that the survivorsIt took the tardigrades up to 36 hours to recover from the vat and start moving again - much longer than the control group, which was frozen and then thawed, but did not pass the test. It took them 8-9 hours to recover.
Researchers say that most asteroid impacts will create pressure that is too high for tardigrades, but some of the impacts occurFor example, up to a third of asteroid collisions on the Moon canbe suitable for the survival of tardigrades. This may have already been accidentally checked by people during the crash of the Beresheet lander in 2019, which carried frozen tardigrades. How well they will cope with the new situation is another matter.
The team also claims that these resultscan be used to test whether tardigrades or other similar life forms live on other worlds in our solar system. The icy moons Europa and Enceladus have underground oceans potentially harboring microorganisms, and we could find evidence of life by testing the jets of water they throw into space through cracks in the ice shell.
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