NASA employee claims that there may be living organisms on the Moon

NASA claims that the astronauts who are scheduled to land on the Moon’s surface in late 2025 may not be the first living organisms on the Earth’s satellite. This is reported by Space.com.

«One of the most striking things our team found is that some airless [космічних] bodies may have potentially habitable niches,» said Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

According to him, microbes can exist on permanently shaded craters at the south pole of the Moon. In particular, Saxena is trying to find an answer to the question of whether life forms that originated on Earth could survive a trip to space and adapt there.

The expert notes that organic molecules could well have entered space with meteorites, but there is no guarantee that microbes will actually survive.

There is another possibility: humans themselves could have left microbes on the Moon when they were last there 50 years ago, or when a failed lunar lander splashed millions of hardy tardigrades (the most famous type of microscopic aquatic multicellular organisms that are resistant to the most extreme conditions possible) on the satellite’s surface in 2019.

«We view humans as the most likely vector [мікробів] given the extensive data we have on the history of lunar exploration. We also have records of aircraft collisions with the Moon, although this is the second highest priority and less influential source of information,» Heather Graham, NASA’s organic chemistry specialist, told Goddard.

Scientists believe that if they ever find life on the Moon, it will probably come from Earth. If the research shows that microbes can survive for a long time, it will give rise to a new range of studies related to the possibility of the Earth’s satellite being colonized by humans or other living beings.

Last week, scientists from the California Institute of Technology for the first time managed to successfully test a wireless solar energy transmitter in space. The scientists now have two goals: to provide this energy to satellites in orbit and to learn how to transmit energy from them to Earth.