UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA

Can living organisms survive a trip through space from one planet to another?

That’s what the satellite design team from the University of Manitoba is hoping to find out. By loading a colony of tiny organisms called tardigrades onto their satellite, the students want to find out if life can survive the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space. A tiny camera will chart the organisms’ progress and relay images back to Earth.

“We want to revive them in space, watch them grow, move towards a food source and reproduce,” said team leader Dario Schor, 27, a graduate student in computer engineering. “This is fairly ambitious. It hasn’t been done in a satellite of this scale ever before.”