Trust NASA to extend its belief in "redundancy" even into--spiders. After auditioning five orb weavers, experts picked the two best candidates to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Endeavour last week for a school-related science project.
But when astronauts unpacked the spider lab, they discovered that the backup spider--no doubt miffed by being only #2--had gone on the lam. Mission managers insist that the spider isn't really "missing", but it just well, hasn't reported its location.
And why are spiders earning arachnid astronaut status? NASA explains:
Sent by Boulder-based BioServe Space Technologies, part of the University of Colorado College of Engineering, the arachnids will serve as a classroom tool for teaching fifth though ninth graders about the effects of zero gravity.
"A lot of spider behavior is based on gravity -- hanging upside down, dropping down on a drag line, even web building," says Stefanie Countryman, Payload Mission Manager for BioServe, which has sent arachnids aloft before on the shuttle Columbia.
"At first weightlessness is a shock and they float around a bit, but they get used to it pretty quickly and start tethering their silk to the walls to crawl across, rather than dropping down," she said.
How is the prime spider doing at work in space? Confused. Instead of weaving normal patterns, the spider has created a tangle as it tries to figure out how to live and work in microgravity.
Here's a video of Prime Spider at work, complete with an itsy-bitsy spider soundtrack.
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