Can the World's Toughest Animal Survive Space?

Tardigrades -- tiny invertebrates that look a bit like eight-legged moles -- can survive just about anything. Starvation, irradiation, dehydration: no problem. How about a vacuum, or deep-sea pressure? Ditto. Extreme heat and cold? Please. When necessary, tardigrades can slow their metabolisms by a factor of ten thousand, and require just one percent of the water they normally consume. They make cockroaches look fragile.

Naturally, any red-blooded scientist wants to know ... how can you kill a tardigrade? Maybe if you shoot it into space? The European Space Agency did just that with its Tardigrades in Space program. (That's right -- TARDIS. Big ups.) From the website:

... exposure of organisms to space conditions will reveal how living cells react to the potentially very stressful impact of space parameters. And organisms that can handle the damaging space parameters will be important sources of knowledge for how to generate the space ecosystems that will be necessary for the more permanent human establishments in space that is envisaged today.

Every word truly spoken, no doubt. But ... maybe if you shoot it into space ... hell, even if you told me that no scientific insight could possibly be generated by such an experiment, I'd want it done, just as a matter of principle, because it's cool. And the folks behind TARDIS seem to feel the same way, though they have the good sense to phrase it more technically:

Why should we send dry aquatic invertebrates into space, an environment that certainly is not normal for these animals? There are many answers to this question. One would be: to see if these animals, as the first ever, are able to cope with the extremely dry conditions of deep vacuum and the harmful solar and galactic radiation up there. In the past, several biologists have suggested that tardigrades may be one of the few animals that have a chance to come back alive after a trip in real space. Finally we will be able to find out if this is true.

So: did the tardigrades live? Did they die? Did they come back in lethal form, ready to take revenge on the wimpy giants who keep sticking them in boiling water and vacuum tubes? We'll find out soon. Their spacecraft returned today, and the data will be analyzed in coming months.

See Also:

• Bacteria Turn Deadly in Space