Tough tardigrades
In one of the greatest feats of endurance, a batch of tardigrades managed to survive 10 days of exposure to open space. The experiment occurred in 2007 as part of the European Space Agency’s FOTON-M3 mission, and it established tardigrades, also known as water bears, as among the toughest organisms on the planet—and off. “Our principle finding is that the space vacuum, which entails extreme dehydration and cosmic radiation, were not a problem for water bears,” said TARDIS project leader Ingemar Jönsson, from the University of Kristianstad in Sweden.
