Why is NASA giving baby squids & water bears free tickets to space next mission? Explained

In the upcoming space mission, SpaceX rocket Falcon 9 will take 5,000 “water bears” and 128 glowing baby squids to the International Space Station (ISS). According to a press release, the US space agency said that the 22nd SpaceX cargo resupply mission carrying scientific research and technology demonstrations will be launching to the ISS on June 3. Apart from tardigrades dubbed as 'water bears’ and baby squids, the cargo resupply mission will also carry more than 7,300 pounds of stuff that indices crew supplies, new solar panels and vehicle hardware. 

The mission will be launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. NASA said that the experiments aboard include studying how water bears tolerate space, whether microgravity affects symbiotic relationships, analyzing the formation of kidney stones, and more. It added that studying how space travel affects them will help scientists in understanding the impact of space travel on humans and coming up with countermeasures against the adverse effects of microgravity.   

Water bears, squid in space 

Tardigrades, known as water bears due to their appearance under a microscope and common habitat in water, are tiny creatures that tolerate environments more extreme than most life forms can. They are not larger than 1.5mm and they are found everywhere from the depths of oceans to mountaintops. They can survive deadly radiation, extreme water, air deprivation and starvation and they have already demonstrated their ability to get through space vacuum when they were last sent to space in September 2007.

Thoman Boothby, the principal investigator of the experiment with the resilient creatures, said, “One of the things we are really keen to do is understand how tardigrades are surviving and reproducing in these environments, and whether we can learn anything about the tricks that they are using and adapt them to safeguard astronauts”. 

He added, “Some of the things that tardigrades can survive include being dried out, being frozen and being heated up past the boiling point of water. They can survive thousands of times as much radiation as we can and they can go for days or weeks with little or no oxygen”. 

As per the press note, scientists are also testing glowing baby bobtail squids which have a special ability to glow because of bacteria that live inside their bodies. The US space agency informed that these creatures have immune systems similar to humans that work in a symbiotic relationship - mutually dependent co-existence. The scientists will be studying how their relationship is affected by space travel, which will guide them in mitigating the adverse effects on human’s symbiotic relationships with bacteria that live in our bodies.

(Image: Twitter)