Surveyor's dramatic recovery overshadowed another space venture involving 1,000 vinegar gnats, 1,000 flour beetles, 560 wasps, 120 frog eggs, 875 amoebae, 13,000 bacteria cells, 78 wheat seedlings, nine pepper plants, 10 million spores of orange bread mold and 64 blue spiderwort. All this was packed aboard a space ark called Biosatellite 2 and launched into earth orbit from Cape Kennedy.
Designed to test the effects of weightlessness on living organisms, the temperature-controlled Biosatellite was stabilized in orbit to provide less than 1/100,000th of the earth's gravity for its tiny occupants. It also was equipped with a strontium 85 source that irradiated some...
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