A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon (2019)
wired.comArticle is a bit breathless.
> and can be viewed using a microscope capable of 1000x magnification—a technology that has been available for hundreds of years.
I don't think so; maybe 100 years. To achieve 1,000x magnification with an optical microscope, you need oil (or some other fluid with a refractive index similar to that of the lens) between the objective lens and the subject.
I believe the maximum theoretical magnification you can achieve with an optical microscope is about 1,400x. The limit is imposed by the minimum wavelength of visible light.
Here's a Physics-Stackexchange answer with a little more detail i support:
You can go higher but it won't help you because you won't see more.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38146/optical-mi...
> ...
> So for violet light λ=405nm, and good lens with oil immersion (NA=1.25), you can have resolution 197nm.
> So, in conclusion, optical microscopes are limited to ~x1500 because going any further does not resolve smaller details.
The comments below the answer add additional details.
Related Wikipedia article (Diffraction-limited system): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system
There are various "tricks" to achieve more -- "Super-resolution microscopy" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_microscopy
> Super-resolution microscopy is a series of techniques in optical microscopy that allow such images to have resolutions higher than those imposed by the diffraction limit.
Interesting. Modern optical microscopes, even cheap ones, do 1000x, though I seem to remember, from playing with a cheapish one, that it was very hard to get a worthwhile image at 1000x. Amazon.co.uk has a microscope for £54.59 that does "1600X" ... "for Kids"! The one I played with wasn't that cheap!
According to random online articles, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) achieved 275x and a few of his instruments have survived until today, in museums, I presume.
1600X seems like the lumens rating of Chinese bike lights on Amazon.
The math for cheap amazon microscopes is often based on the ratio of a digital image. So use a 60" monitor rather than 30" you have an extra 2x magnification. But not better resolution!
Are you sure? I ask because the Dutch were wild by the end of the seventeenth century, people like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek achieved 500x magnification with a single lens microscope as an example. If you wonder why I know this, it’s because this was when the first bacteria are believed to have been observed. Leading off to the next part that I’m not so sure of, but the single lens microscope was/is terrible to use, and this lead to the first compound microscopes being build shortly there after. I believe the practical limit of those is 2,500x magnification though I’m not sure when that was made possible, but many of the ones we have in education today range from 400-1000x magnification (mostly down to cost and care of the institution).
> 2,500x magnification
You can, of course, magnify as much as you want; but you won't see more detail.
"Junior" microscopes often brag of a 1000x magnification; but that only works if the lenses are really good, and in that kind of microscope, they aren't.
You need 1000x to see bacteria. Bacteria are really boring to look at; they appear as undifferentiated spheres or rods. And even then you can't see them at all without fixing and staining.
Single-lens microscopes suffer from spherical abberation (only the centre of the image is in focus) and chromatic abberation (everything has rainbow fringes around it). These problems are worse with greater magnification.
As far as I can tell, the best "mass-market" compound lenses these days are made in China.
Source: I bought my son a microscope a few months ago; he said he wanted to see bacteria. I hoped a "junior" 'scope would get me off the hook, but I consulted suppliers, and they warned me off, and told me quite a lot about how to choose a 'scope. I also bought him a set of stains and solvents, including a gram-staining kit. I did a fair bit of research before I spent money.
The trick is to find some multi-millimeter bacteria. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/june/worlds-largest....
tardigrades are far more interesting to look at than bacteria. Basically all the tiny animacules. You need no more than 5X-10X and are quite easy to see when they're still alive.
10x is good enough for many interesting subjects. Stuff like daphnia, and especially diatoms. I'd like to have a source of diatoms. I tried car-body rubbing compound, which is sometimes made with diatoms, but I don't think the stuff I tried had diatoms in it.
I spent a feverish couple of weeks learning about microscopy and slide-preparation, before handing over the 'scope I bought to my son, to save him time doing the research himself (I guess I was afraid he'd be too busy). I've handed it over now; but I bought myself a 10x and 20x hand-lens.
You can order live diatoms from Carolina Biological: https://www.carolina.com/algae/diatoms-living/FAM_153020.pr
you can grow the culture you get from them continuously if you enjoy keeping algae pets. note that diatom are really hard to see, and you do want very high magnification.
These days I don't really use slides- I found that glass-bottom petri dishes work well, but that's at least partly because I do inverted imaging (objective pointing up, through the sample, towards the illumination) with a custom-built XY stage microscope.
Happen to blog about it, or have some links?
I bought from these people:
http://www.brunelmicroscopes.co.uk/
They have some good pages on choosing a microscope.
There are sites dealing with amateur microscopy that have many pages of advice on setting-up and using microscopes, and on staining and slide preparation.
I don't blog, at least not at the moment.
I've looked at a couple sources and they all say 250x:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9186497/
https://www.nsf.gov/news/speeches/colwell/rc01_anatlesson/ts...
You seem to be right:
https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/Anton_van_Leeuwenhoek
Says 275x. I guess my education lied to me.
I mean if it was "so far we haven't found evidence of any optical instrument of that magnitude available at that time", fair enough, but you're suggesting people didn't had oil few hundred years ago...
Not at all. But there's no point in going to oil-immersion microscopy, if you haven't yet invented compound lenses. Those are a 19th-century development.
The chances that none of the made-made objects that touched the moon carried a few tardigrades is very small anyway.
The idea we can move so far away with such complicated processes without any contamination is just a dream, no matter the precautions we take. We can just limit it to the minimum, which is already quite amazing.
So the israeli ones are just the one we know about.
> So the israeli ones are just the one we know about.
Yes, but much easier to condemn in the General Assembly.
Establishing an apartheid state tends to do that, yes.
Yes, those tardigrades should go back where they came from! Free the crater!
you are handwaving decades of strict anti contamination protocol. with all respect, you sound like someone spreading anti vax theories.
This shows the difference between physics and drama. Physics tells us nothing much happened. Drama tells us they survived, they evolved, and are just waiting for their water-thirsty revenge...
"tardigraves find a way."
wikipedia:
They have been found in diverse regions of Earth's biosphere – mountaintops, the deep sea, tropical rainforests, and the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other known forms of life. Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.
> Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.
We don’t have to leave this hanging as if tardigrades can survive anything; they’re robust but not immortal. The very same article discusses what that sentence about space really means. In the most direct experiment done so far, after 10 days of exposure to the vacuum of space but not solar radiation, a third weren’t able to reanimate, and after that “subsequent mortality was high”. For tardigrades that were exposed to the vacuum and solar radiation “had significantly reduced survival, with only three subjects of Milnesium tardigradum surviving.” Of the Israeli Lunar Lander, Wikipedia says “in May 2021 it was reported that they were unlikely to have survived the impact.” It might be reasonable to speculate and extrapolate based on the 10 day experiment that even if any did survive impact they probably haven’t by now with three and a half years of vacuum, even if they did land in the shadows, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#Survival_after_expo...
So on some future space mining trip to the moon, these will some how get picked up, then after their long sleep, and some mutations from cosmic rays, will start taking out the crew one by one?
No. Mutation doesn't imply it just morphed for dramatic purposes.
What if it got radioactive and then bit one of the crew who took on tardigrade qualities, and started taking out the crew? Or maybe a transporter incident where the tardigrades DNA merged with a humans, and it started taking out the crew? Or 25th century Meta started secret experiments on Luna tardigrades and decided they wanted to test their new weapon on the unsuspecting crew of some old transport ship?
I too am waiting for ygg2s’ answers as he seems knowledgable on the subject
Wait, no more.
> Wait, no more.
Commas matter -- e.g., "No more tequila" vs. "No, more tequila."
Does it change meaning in this case? Wait. Drama Pause. No more.
Usually Grammarly catches these errors, but it doesn't work on HN for some idiotic reason.
What if you got bitten by slightly irradiated mosquito? Nothing.
Yeah, this isn't a Marvel comic.
Best case scenario, tardigrades develop to feed on people. Since they are microscopic they get to compete with other of our parasites. Huzzah.
My replies weren't entirely serious. The parent paraphrased Jurassic park so I think I'm allowed to reference other scifi tropes.
I don't think that's the 'best' case. Dinosaurs evolved from simpler things than tardigrades so if we mess up this planet enough that we have to leave and only the tardigrades survive, our offspring could return to find giant tardigrade type things that eat our not so human children. Or we could time travel forward to that time. The choice of delorean, TARDIS or some kind of planet of the apes time travel, I leave up to you.
Someone did some research on if they could have survived... doesn't seem likely https://www.science.org/content/article/hardy-water-bears-su...
Possibility to evolve ability to utilise cosmic mycelial network for fast travel?
LOL
As someone who has worked onmultiple spacecraft, including a lunar lander, this is no surprise. Cleanrooms are great but ISO 8 (the most common cleanliness standard for spacecraft manufacture) isnt perfect.
Missions to Mars and other planets have much much stricter cleanliness requirements, so much so that it becomes a real barrier to work and cost.
I quite enjoy the idea that some of my DNA is now on the moon.
Are cleanliness standards relevant in this context? As far as I can tell, the tardigrades — and everything else mentioned in the article — were put there on purpose.
I think the overall point is that while this was purposeful, the cleanliness standards mean that this has likely already occurred accidentally.
2019
(2019).
I'd be interested to know whether that tardigrade image is actually a photo.
> (2019)
Interesting why this comes up now, then.
> I'd be interested to know whether that tardigrade image is actually a photo.
I'd imagine so. This is exactly what they do look like. Though this is the most detailed image I think that I've ever seen, it is not far beyond other images that I know for certain are not renders.
It doesn't appear to be standing on anything though - could it have been suspended in a liquid of the same density as itself? Despite the image being credited to Getty Images, I couldn't find it in their catalogue.
Water?> could it have been suspended in a liquid of the same density as itself
Don't worry, they'll be fine.
;)
I got a postcard from the tardigrades the other day. They're fine and they say hi.
possibly a failed attempt to infiltrate the nazi moon-base?
But any humans of 1940s German origin up there would have brought tardigrades of their own.
Aliens exist!
Tardigrades, sure. But they're out there!
Tardigrades aren't aliens, they're emigrants. Of course from the moon people's pov, they are aliens.
Does the term apply like that? At what point would they become alien - small or significant evolution?
Is there a right answer?
google gives the definition "supposedly from another world".
tardigrades are from this world. i wouldnt define a mars born human as alien, so i wouldnt say its based on where that generation was born either.
evolutionarily, i suppose for me the dividing line is when the creature has evolved to the point where its more at home in its new habitat than its old. i dont think youre ever going to get a bullet proof, exceptionless definition though.
> tardigrades are from this world.
There are plenty of them here, but did they evolve on Earth or arrive from elsewhere...?
They are DNA-based organisms, like every other known life form, all of which evolved on Earth, so it seems reasonable to assume they evolved here too. Of course you might hypothesize that DNA is a building block of life that is not unique to Earth, but that's a whole other can of worms...
Have you got any particular evidence? We could hypothecate that God made them, that isn't really science though.
Make My Day on Netflix now makes a lot more sense.
It was said there was hummus on the Moon which may explain why Israel sent the tardigrades.
In any case, the alleged tardigrades were actually in the “tun state” (dehydrated) and on a 1 cm square piece of tape that was embedded in epoxy resin. Therefore if they were not vaporized by the impact of the crash they would be preserved but unable to reanimate…
This is why NATO has sent several secret resupply missions with solvent, tiny water bottles, and pita bread, in recent years. But so far all attempts to rehydrate the tardigrades have also crashed.
this will be an interesting case study of current theories of evolution in a couple thousand years