Tonight, 75 rats as space astronauts will be launched into polar orbit!
Why is this worth attention?
TASS reported today.
The carrier rocket "Soyuz-2.1b" and the "Bion-M" No. 2 biological satellite will be launched tonight and will send the payload into polar orbit.
The payload carries 75 mice, about 1,500 fruit flies, and other organisms to help assess the safety of such orbits for crewed missions.
The launch is scheduled for 20:13 Moscow time from the Pad 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The biological satellite will operate in orbit for 30 days and land on the steppes of Orenburg Oblast on September 19.
External to the device, a meteor simulator containing living cells has been installed - scientists plan to use it to study whether life could possibly survive inside meteors when they pass through Earth's dense atmosphere.
The project aims to study how organisms withstand flight in high-latitude orbits, as cosmic radiation levels in such orbits are one-third higher than those in the orbit of the International Space Station.
The results will lay the foundation for methods to protect and ensure human spaceflight, including long-range flights.
This group had two backups on Earth: 25 mice will spend a month in the simulation equipment of the biological satellite, and another 25 mice will be in the laboratory.
The main data pool is planned to be analyzed within one year after the mice return.
Especially complex is the analysis of video recordings, whose total duration should exceed two years after the end of the flight.
A polar orbit is an Earth satellite orbit with an inclination of 90°, its orbital plane is perpendicular to the Earth's equatorial plane and crosses the North and South Poles, enabling global coverage observation, often used in meteorological monitoring, navigation positioning, Earth resource surveying, and military reconnaissance fields.
Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1840925508164619/
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