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takyon writes:

NASA sent rodents to infest the ISS along with an HPE supercomputer:

NASA's future deep space exploration – including to Mars – is an unprecedented venture in spaceflight, requiring us to tackle challenges we've never faced before. For instance, we know the human body changes significantly while in space, and we'll need to find ways to address those effects. NASA is conducting research to learn more about the long-term impact of extended human spaceflight. One experiment that just launched, Rodent Research-9, is contributing to this goal by sending rodents to the International Space Station, to study how a lack of gravity in space affects blood vessels, eyes and joints.

Using transport and habitat technology developed at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, the mice will fly to the space station aboard the 12th SpaceX resupply mission, and return to Earth about a month later. Due to biological similarities to humans, the mouse is a good choice of model organism for research aimed at understanding biological changes caused by the space environment. By studying rodents in the short term, NASA can make predictions about long-term human biological change in space, with applications here on Earth as well.

[...] For Rodent Research-9, the agency's space biology program is sponsoring three scientists from different universities to address different issues. NASA's bio-specimen sharing allows the three investigators to work with the same group of mice, without having to send three different missions to the space station. The three complementary research investigations will be combined into one cost-effective mission, addressing questions that are fundamental to human space exploration.

Rodents, meet human guinea pigs.

Technical mission page. Story reprint.

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