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#nasa

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Nearly 4,000 #NASA employees have opted to leave space agency through the Trump administration's deferred resignation program, NASA said on Saturday. The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce, and will reduce the agency from 18,000 to 14,000 employees, NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in a statement shared with NPR. The total number includes the agency's loss of 500 other workers due to normal attrition, she said. npr.org/2025/07/26/nx-s1-54813 #space #science #scientists #engineers

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Tardigrades in space

From Wikipedia

The use of tardigrades in space, first proposed in 1964 because of their extreme tolerance to radiation, began in 2007 with the FOTON-M3 mission in low Earth orbit, where they were exposed to space's vacuum for 10 days, and reanimated, just by rehydration, back on Earth. In 2011, tardigrades were on board the International Space Station on STS-134. In 2019, a capsule containing tardigrades was on board the Israeli lunar lander Beresheet which crashed on the Moon.

Tardigrades are small arthropods able to tolerate extreme environments. Many live in tufts of moss, such as on rooftops, where they get repeatedly dried out and rewetted. Others live in the Arctic or atop mountains, where they are exposed to cold. When dried, they go into a cryptobiotic 'tun' state in which metabolism is suspended. They have been described as the toughest animals on Earth.
Their DNA is protected from damage, such as by radiation, by Dsup proteins.

In 1964, R.M. May and colleagues proposed that the tardigrade Macrobiotus areolatus would be a suitable model organism for space experiments because of its exceptional radiation tolerance.

In 2001, R. Bertolani and colleagues proposed tardigrades as a model for a study of animal survival in space. As terrestrial experiments on tardigrades proceeded, knowledge of their survival abilities grew, enabling K.I. Jönsson in 2007, and then other researchers such as Daiki Horikawa in 2008 and Roberto Guidetti in 2012, to present evidence that they would resist desiccation, radiation, heat, and cold, suiting them for astrobiological studies.

In 2008, F. Ono and colleagues suggested that tardigrades might be able to survive a journey through space on a meteorite, enabling panspermia, the transfer of life from one planet to another. [...]
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigra