2023-07-14 10:02:13
Scientists decided to send fish into space to observe the consequences of gravity on the human body.
Cosmic fish. This week, the Chinese State News Agency revealed that small fish will be sent into orbit around the Earth, more precisely in the Tiangong space station. The animals, which will take part in scientific research, will serve to protect astronauts in the future from the dangers of weightlessness.
In order to carry out this research, taikonauts, as Chinese astronauts are called, favor the use of zebrafish, known to be genetically similar to humans. Thus, this will make it possible to observe “how they and other microorganisms interact inside a small closed ecosystem”, but above all to analyze “the loss of bone density in astronauts” due to microgravity in the space.
Astronauts in danger
The researchers want to know if the absence or near absence of gravity could have potentially serious physiological consequences for the health of astronauts. Indeed, like Thomas Pesquet, astronauts generally have to spend nearly six months on board the International Space Station.
Small vertebrates are less likely than humans to survive in space, according to a study conducted on the ISS in 2016 and published by the Japanese Space Agency in Scientific Reports. They started losing bone density almost as soon as they arrived. According to other research, these consequences had been evaluated at about twenty days in humans.
Spatial seasickness in fish
It is therefore not a first to send fish into space. It was in 1973 that small fish from the salt marshes of the Atlantic, called mummichips, were the subject of an experiment at Skylab. This NASA science lab, which circled the Earth at the time, wanted to know how a fish responds to a weightless environment. Namely that if humans on Earth only move in two dimensions, especially under the effect of gravity, fish move in three dimensions in water.
When astronauts suffer from a form of space seasickness, at the start of a mission, the fish would begin to loop and spin in a loop like the hands of a clock. But as the days passed, they learned to orient themselves better thanks to Skylab’s artificial light. Natural sunlight never reaches the bottom of the ocean, so it always faces upwards. In contrast, fish born in space immediately adapted to their weightless environment.
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