In simple terms, those newly irradiated molecules then troll through the body causing all sorts of harm. Ionizing radiation enters the body and bores into wayward molecules that contain oxygen. According to Peter Guida, the head of NASA's space radiation laboratory, one of the biggest radiation concerns for astronauts (and space-bound tardigrades) is a set of molecules called reactive oxygen species. What Happens If an Astronaut Dies in Space?īut here, too, the tardigrade seems oddly prepared for life in space. When that happens, the creature pops back to life like a re-wetted sponge and continues onward as if nothing had happened. In this state, the tardigrade just persists, doing nothing, until it's inundated with water again. Tardigrades will enter a state called desiccation, in which they shrivel up, losing all but around three percent of their body's water and slowing their metabolism down to an astonishing 0.01 percent of its normal speed. Without water, they're about as lively as a beached dolphin.īut land-dwelling tardigrades have evolved a bizarre solution to living through drought: When their environment dries up, so do they. Yet these are technically aquatic creatures, and require a thin layer of water to do pretty much anything, including eating, having sex, or moving around. "I've collected living tardigrades from under a rock in the Sinai desert, in a part of the desert that hadn't had any record of rain for the previous 25 years," Miller says. Land-dwelling tardigrades can be found in some of the driest places on Earth. Rather, the tardigrade's space-surviving ability is the result of a strange response they've evolved to overcome an earthly life-threatening problem: a water shortage. When the water bears returned to Earth, the scientists discovered that 68 percent lived through the ordeal.Īlthough tardigrades are unique in their ability to survive in space, Miller insists there is no reason to believe they evolved for this reason or-as a misleading VICE documentary has implied-that they are of extraterrestrial origin. A European team of researchers sent a group of living tardigrades to orbit the earth on the outside of a FOTON-M3 rocket for 10 days.
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In 2007, scientists discovered these microscopic critters can survive an extended stay in the cold, irradiated vacuum of outer space. "Many species of tardigrades live in water, but on land, you find them almost everywhere there's moss or lichen." Hundreds of species "are found across the seven continents everywhere from the highest mountain to the lowest sea," he says. William Miller, a leading tardigrade researcher at Baker University, says they are remarkably abundant. Tardigrades are a class of microscopic animals with eight limbs and strange, alien-like behavior. NANOCLUSTERING/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Getty Images