Pigs in a Space Blanket
: ’ to be the Earth creature to explore space beyond our solar system. Instead, that title will go to two microscopic organisms scientists have deemed hardy enough to have a shot at surviving the experience. Meet your competition. Tardigrades (aliases include water bears and moss piglets, because scientists can’t resist their pudgy cuteness) can plausibly claim to be the most resilient animals on the planet, which is why they are a really good candidate to leave it. There are more than 1,000 species of tardigrade, and some water bears are so indestructible scientists think no matter what happens to Earth, these little buggers could probably survive.
The other critter packing its bags is a microscopic roundworm called
Caenorhabditis elegans, or C. elegans for short. It’s been a workhorse for more than five decades in laboratories. Scientists use it to study everything from sleep to aging, and some of these worms already survived one of the greatest space tragedies, the destruction of the space shuttle
Columbia in 2003. They’d been on board to help scientists see whether genes are expressed differently in space, compared with here on Earth.
The mission looking to enlist tardigrades and C. elegans is called Starlight, and the plan is to use a giant laser beam to push a small spacecraft— about the size of a smartphone or smaller—out of the solar system at very fast speeds. Ideally, according to the project’s lead scientist, the smallest of these spacecraft would be able to reach a quarter of the speed of light, which would mean they could reach the nearest star (and the nearest planet not in our solar system) about 20 years after launching. (The only spacecraft to have left our solar system so far is Voyager 1, and it took almost 40 years just to hit the edge.)
The Starlight team wants to put its tiny astronauts into a dormant state for launch, then nudge them awake periodically and watch them every so often along the journey. Tardigrades normally live a few months, but take away the water around them and they enter a cocooned state in which they can survive for decades, which makes them the perfect frequent flyers.
CRAWL SPACE Tardigrades, considered virtually indestructible on Earth, will now have their mettle tested in space.