When news emerged that an Israeli spacecraft carrying microscopic near-indestructible lifeforms called tardigrades had crashed into the moon, people excitedly started calling it a colonisation. After all, tardigrades can survive pummelling by extreme pressure and radiation and potentially live for over 100 years without food, water or oxygen.

The problem is that only happens when tardigrades enter a spore-like state that slows their metabolism down a hundred-fold. They might survive, but you wouldn’t call it living. Unless we rescue the tardigrades, they will ultimately die. And I can’t see anyone sending astronauts to scrabble around the moon with a microscope to collect them.

But there’s a serious issue here. Every mission to the moon leaves something behind. Now we’re littering it with doomed tardigrades. If we’re not careful, the moon will become little more than a dumping ground for our space junk. And, as Monica Grady writes, the stakes will be higher if we start doing the same thing to other planets.

Looking further out into space, scientists think they may have worked out why spiral galaxies are symmetrical even when they’re over half a million light years across. And instead of resorting to using the theoretical mystery substance dark matter to fill the holes in their equations, they’ve come up with an explanation that is similar to a 400-year-old idea that the astronomer Johannes Kepler had about snowflakes.

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