NASA is planning to send baby squids to the International Space Station. BBC reports that the agency will launch 100 baby squid and 5,000 microscopic animals up there this week. SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 will be outfitted with the materials to conduct some experiments. Researchers want to find the effects of spaceflight on small organisms. More specifically, the bobtail squid that is being used has an immune system similar to humans. The agency thinks that these kinds of experiments could improve space travel for long-term missions. Also aboard the ship are those 5,000 tardigrades. They can survive in hostile environments like the inhospitable climes of space. Adapting to the elements is what they do and researchers are hoping that humans can one day too.
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Jamie Foster, the principal investigator for this experiment told, “Animals, including humans, rely on our microbes to maintain a healthy digestive and immune system. We do not fully understand how spaceflight alters these beneficial interactions,”
“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,” Thomas Boothby, the experiment’s principal investigator added.
Watchmen‘s Damon Lindelof told Collider about his effort to bring squids falling from the sky to the HBO series.
Lindelof explained, “Super duper exciting, incredibly daunting. From the jump, before we even did the pilot, I said to everybody on the crew ‘Just so you guys know, we’re doing the squid. We’re going to do November 2, 1985, so just start wrapping your brains around that.’ Eric, our VFX supervisor, and Matt, when we were talking about them coming aboard the show I said, ‘Just so you know we’re doing the squid’ and they said ‘Yes!’ “
What would you do if squids fell from the sky? Let us know in the comments!
