This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we're going to be talking about the big space news, that black hole, actually. Did you see that? Isn't that an amazing, amazing photo? If you have questions, you have questions you'd like to ask the experts? Well, you can, if you make the call, our number 844-724-8255 or tweet us at Sci-Fi.

We'll get to that right after our news roundup.

And it has been a busy week in space, including the unveiling of that historic image,

last night's launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket,

and an attempted moon landing by the Israeli spacecraft beretsheet.

Spacecraft failed in the final minutes and probably crash landed.

That's what they think, on the surface of the moon.

So to me now to talk about that and other selected short stories in science is Umer Erfhan, staff writer for Vox.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Welcome back.

Thanks, Ira.

Let's talk about this. Let's look at the moon landing attempt. What was it? Who was behind it? What happened to it?

Well, it was done by an Israeli nonprofit called Space I-L, and what was particularly significant about it was that this mission was one of the first privately financed missions to the moon. This cost about $100 million. It was launched aboard a SpaceX rocket,

and it was carrying some instruments to measure the moon's magnetic field. But of course,

yesterday, as you mentioned, they lost contact on its way down, and the mission controllers

presumed that the spacecraft has crashed. So we don't know, yeah, we controllers presume that the spacecraft has crashed.

So we don't know, yeah, we don't know why it probably crashed.

It's a little early to tell right now.

Yeah, moving on, you have another story in Vox, moon-related story about human waste.

Yeah, that's right. My colleague at Vox, Brian Resnick, did a pretty thorough investigation of what the Apollo astronauts left behind. Now, they took a lot of stuff to the moon and they took a lot of stuff back, but what in particular was interesting was these 96 jet bags or bags that were jettisoned, and in them were human waste, including feces. Now, that's actually of a particular interest to a small group of

scientists because human feces contain, are about 50% by weight bacteria. And it could give us

some important lessons about what we can expect when it comes to living in space and about

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