NASA will take out living organisms out of the Earth orbit in 2020

NASA Space Agency for the last timereleased living organisms beyond Earth orbit in the distant 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 landed on the moon. The semicentennial silence will be broken already in 2020 - the agency intends to launch the BioSentinel spacecraft into the Sun's orbit, inside of which there will be a container with yeast fungi. During this mission, scientists want to find out what will happen to living organisms in conditions of extremely strong radiation.

It is known that the developed device BioSentinelweighs 14 kilograms and resembles a small box. According to Space.com, the assembly of the device will be completed as early as October, but it will be launched with the help of the Space Launch System (SLS) launch vehicle only in mid-2020. Besides him, another 12 microsatellites will fly on the rocket.

Inside BioSentinel there are two varieties.Saccharomyces cerevisiae: one of them will be more resistant to cosmic radiation than the other. The device will collect data on fungi for 9-12 months - in particular, the researchers hope to get detailed information on the reproduction of yeast fungi. At the same time, scientists will observe the same group of fungi that will remain on the International Space Station - there the radiation level is much lower, and there will be a big difference between the two groups of samples.

The authors of the future study noted thatDNA repair in yeast occurs in the same way as in humans. The discoveries that will be made during the study will make it possible to study the possible effects of space travel on human health.

Recall that researchers from michiganHenry Ford Hospitals recently found out that space travel can cause irreparable damage to joints. This became known thanks to the experiment on mice - you can read about it in our material.

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