When the sun shines on its surface, temperatures can reach nearly 130 degrees Celsius - but in the shade it can drop as low as minus 170 degrees. The surface is covered in grains of sharp, abrasive dust.

In short, the moon is one heck of an uninhabitable place. Nothing can live there, right?

Well, we might be about to find out.

Earlier this year an un-crewed Israeli moon lander had a less than smooth landing. It crashed, and as it did so, it may have ejected some of its cargo onto the surface of the moon. That cargo included a 30 million page archive of human history contained on a set of small nickel disks.

It also included some living creatures - microscopic animals known as tardigrades.

Tardigrades are the most fascinating little critters. Usually only around half a millimetre in length, they have a barrel-like body with eight stubby little legs, and a scrunched up little face. They live just about anywhere, and they especially like damp places - hence they've been given the nicknames "water bear" and "moss piglet".

The cool thing about tardigrades is that they can survive in the most extreme environments we can imagine. When the going gets tough they just kind of switch off, entering a state called cryptobiosis.

They curl up into a dehydrated ball, all but switch off their metabolism, and produce special proteins that help protect their organs and DNA. And then, when conditions improve and they're exposed to water again, they rehydrate and come back to life.

Research on these little critters has shown that they can withstand extreme temperatures, both higher and lower than those experienced on the moon. Scientists have boiled them, frozen them, exposed them to radiation, put them under intense pressure and sent them out into the vacuum of space.

And everything that we've thrown at them, they've survived. One study found that they could revive tardigrades that had been frozen for more than 30 years. Another had them surviving after 10 days in low Earth orbit, exposed to space vacuum and a bunch of radiation.

The tardigrades spilt on the moon were in this state of cryptobiosis. But will they survive and be able to come back to life?

Kind of sadly, experts say it's unlikely.

Surviving for a few days in space, or at high and low temperatures in a lab, is far different from crash landing on the moon and spending weeks, months or years being exposed to solar radiation and all of the other conditions of space.

Although they're much tougher than us, even a tardigrade is unlikely to be tough enough to survive on the moon for long.

Secretly though, when I look up at the moon tonight, I like to imagine that there is a little water bear up there, smiling back down at me.