Water Bears can Survive in Space

Space is extremely cold (near absolute zero) and it is a vacuum with no oxygen, plus the additional threat of lethal radiation from stars. It is considered the most hostile of environments, where unprotected humans would last for a fraction of a second.

But new research shows that some animals - "water bears", properly known as tardigrades - can survive exposure to the open-space vacuum, cold, and radiation just fine.

This is the first time that any animal has been tested for survival under open-space conditions. Tardigrades are tiny invertebrate animals from 0.1 to 1.5mm in size that can be easily found on wet lichens and mosses. Because their homes often fall dry, tardigrades are very resistant to drying out and can resurrect after years of dryness. Along with this amazing survival trick comes extreme resistance to heat, cold and radiation —so tardigrades seemed like an ideal animal to test in space.

The dried-up tardigrades were aboard a spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency in September 2007 and were exposed to open space conditions in a low Earth orbit of around 168 miles altitude. After their safe return to Earth, it turned out that while most of them survived exposure to vacuum and cosmic rays alone, some had even survived the exposure to the deadly levels of solar UV radiation, which are more than 1000 times higher than on the surface of the Earth. Even more so, the survivors could reproduce fine after their space trip.

Below are a pair of videos with water bears in action:





Original article here.