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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:45AM
NASA today are mostly a bunch of parasites thinking up more innovative ways to suck tax money.
Spending all that money on figuring out all the bad things that happen to us in zero g and spending zero on stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
I guess it's just too much useful science to compare mice in a 1g centrifuge with mice in a Mars g centrifuge and mice in a Moon g container for a similar period. Oh nos we might actually learn something useful for our species like whether Mars level gravity is OK for us in the long term and thus help us decide based on _scientific_ evidence (rather than wishful thinking) whether we really want to spend billions/trillions and years/decades trying to get people there and to live there. I guess if it turns out we can't do well in Mars g, they might have to downsize the entire Mars colonization department or similar, so meanwhile let's not look too closely at such stuff...
And look at all those isolation experiments they keep having in Hawaii: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HI-SEAS#Missions [wikipedia.org]
Nice way for the _administrators_ to get paid to stay Hawaii every now and then. I guess it would put an end to the paid holidays in Hawaii if someone actually asked the US Navy on their notes for selecting, training and handling nuclear submariners who have to be stuck in metal tubes for months with no escape.