Successful Subject Safety Or Critter Crunch With Foton-M?

From the Russian News & Information Agency (RIA Novosti) comes a report that the Foton-M bio-satellite’s re-entry module, launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on September 14, has landed successfully approximately 105 miles away from Kostanai in northern Kazakhstan. All of the scheduled experiments were successfully carried out, according to Nikolai Sokolov, the flight director of the 12-day mission.




Aboard the satellite were all sorts of creatures, from snails and cockroaches to gerbils and butterflies. The landing may have caused the demise of some of these experimental subjects, but earlier trips into space for such denizens of our planet have found them to be survivors upon landing. The subjects were sealed into special containers and a video camera filmed them during the flight. This mission included a number of experiments ordered by Roscosmos (the Russian Federal Space Agency), NASA, the European Space Agency and universities from five countries. This was an ongoing experiment into the effects of space flight by the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP).