Tardigrades survive the vacuum of space

These water bears can handle the cold, the vacuum, and the radiation like it's nothing

By Smartasaurus· 1 min read Curious

hurtling through the literal void of space

Scale check

Gut call — how extreme does this actually get?

Reality tends to overshoot. Pick your ceiling.

The short version

These water bears can handle the cold, the vacuum, and the radiation like it's nothing
Their trick is called *cryptobiosis*.
If anything on this planet outlasts us, the smart money is on the water bear.

In 2007, scientists strapped a few thousand tardigrades to the outside of a satellite, opened them to the vacuum of space, and ten days later brought them home alive.

Tardigrades are microscopic, eight-legged animals — half a millimetre long, with claws and a tube-shaped mouth — that live in moss, gutters, glaciers, and abyssal trenches. The space experiment, called TARDIS, was the first to expose an animal directly to open space. Most survived the vacuum. A smaller group survived both vacuum *and* the full spectrum of unfiltered solar radiation. Several of the females laid viable eggs after coming back down.

Their trick is called *cryptobiosis*. Faced with desiccation, cold, heat, or radiation, a tardigrade expels almost all the water from its body, curls into a barrel-shaped *tun*, and replaces its lost water with a sugar called trehalose that turns the inside of its cells into a glass-like solid. Metabolism stops. Damage stops. The animal is not dead; it is paused. Add a drop of water and it resumes within hours.

Certify this discovery

Two questions. Prove you actually read it.

Get both right and this discovery is certified: +50 XP toward your next rank. No account needed.

Sources (2) — tap to view