14 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

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From crash landings to out-of-this-world cotton, 2019 was a big year for

lunar exploration. Previously, only the U.S., Russia and China had managed

to land successfully on the moon. But now other national space agencies are

charging ahead with their own science goals, and private companies of all sizes are

finding ways to join in. Not to be left out, NASA is renewing its own plans for lunar

exploration. The result has been a year of lunar successes and failures — and lots of

big talk — with final outcomes still very much up in the air.

It’s Prime

Time for a

New Gene

Editor

i

CRISPR may have

generated a lot of

buzz this year, but

some researchers are

already looking beyond

it to the next new gene-

editing technique. Say

hello to prime editing.

“If CRISPR is like

scissors ... then you can

think of prime editors

like word processors,”

said chemist David Liu

in an October press

briefing. He spoke days

ahead of the first-ever

prime editing study,

published in Nature and

authored by Liu and

his team at the Broad

Institute of MIT and

Harvard University. Liu

explained that, while

CRISPR cuts through

DNA’s double helix to

snip out genes, prime

editing searches for and

replaces targeted genes

without such slicing and

dicing, reducing the risk

of unintended changes

to the genetic code.

The team was able

to correct mutations

associated with both

sickle cell and Tay-

Sachs diseases. Liu

believes the technique

ultimately might be

able to correct almost

90 percent of such

mutations, but stressed

additional studies are

needed to gauge prime

editing’s full potential.

“This is the begin-

ning, rather than

the end,” said Liu.

• Alex Orlando

Israel Shoots for the Moon

The lunar lander Beresheet made history this year, though

not exactly how its creators intended. Israeli nonprofit

SpaceIL, teaming up with state-owned defense company Israel

Aerospace Industries, built and operated the craft. SpaceIL was

founded for one main purpose: getting to the moon. It was a response to

Google’s Lunar XPRIZE, which in 2007 promised $20 million to a company that could

land gently on the moon and complete a small series of tasks. No team had claimed

the prize by the time it expired, after repeated extensions, in 2018.

The Beresheet mission continued anyway, launching Feb. 22 on a Falcon 9 rocket

made by U.S. company SpaceX. It entered lunar orbit on April 4, making it the first

privately funded spacecraft — and Israel the seventh nation — to orbit the moon.

But on April 11, as Beresheet approached the surface, a faulty response to a minor

sensor failure triggered an engine shutdown. Mission control managed to restart

the engine, but by that point it was moving too fast to avoid a crash. When mission

control lost contact with the spacecraft, it was less than 500 feet from the surface,

and moving at more than 300 mph. (Wiredd reported in August that the crash landing

may also have introduced tardigrades — hardy life-forms that can survive incredibly

harsh conditions — onto the lunar surface. Their fate remains unknown.)

3

Race for

the Moon

BY KOREY HAYNES

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