Posted on 08/31/2009 10:14:33 AM PDT by anymouse
A team of six intrepid mice are going where no rodents have gone before: The International Space Station.
The small rodents are part of an Italian study investigating the effects of bone loss in space, and researchers have set the mice up in orbital style.
"Basically, it's a little hotel," said Joe Delai, Discovery's payload manager, of the cages holding the space mice. "They have a room and a place to eat and sleep."
That creature comfort is key, he said. After all, the little mice will be living in space for at least three months before hitching a ride back home.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
space ping
Something tells me this probably doesn’t end well for the mice.
Now the space station has mice, whats next, roaches? /s
I assume that they have been trained to maneuver in zero G’s.
Little hotel might not be of much use without little bars to grab and pull themselves around with.
"Mouse, the other white meat"
How do they deal with mouse pee and poop, sans gravity? The stuff will simply be floating around the cages and could be pretty grody if it got out.....
What if the mice get out? They can wreak havoc in the wiring.
they check in but they don’t check out!
A day later the experiment had mysteriously disappeared...
Do they have teeny, tiny little space toilets?
there are not going to be 6 mice in 3 months probably a lot more!
What do you expect, they are Italian mice. ;)
How many kids today dream of growing up to be orbital mouse wranglers??
A couple of weeks ago I ran across an interminable Tom & Jerry cartoon on TV where they were stowaways on a mission to Mars. Fortunately they weren’t bothered by the thin atmosphere on Mars and could scamper around as easily as on earth. It got tedious after a while so I didn’t watch long enough to find out if they made it back to earth.
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