Spiders in Space without Ziggy Stardust
Paula Cushing, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and Stefanie Countryman, Project Manager at BioServe Space Technologies, University of Colorado Boulder, tell us about sending life science experiments into space.
The very idea of spiders in space brings to mind campy, black and white horror films involving eight-legged monsters. In reality, it is a scientific investigation in which researchers observe how spider behaviors change in a microgravity environment. Stefanie Countryman worked closely with Paula Cushing to obtain the spiders and analyze their behavior. BioServe designed, developed and built the spider flight habitats, which were placed inside a BioServe-built device known as a Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus, or CGBA, on the International Space Station.