Flies, the first astronauts
- Born 3 November 1957. Sputnik 2 was released into space with a dog named Laika (in Russian “thief”). So, it's just turned 60 years since the first living being orbited the Earth. But that doesn't mean, as you tend to think, that Laika was the first animal to come into space, not even the first mammal. On June 14, 1949, the United States sent a monkey named Albert II (rhesus makakoa) 134 kilometres from the earth’s surface. According to the definition of the US Air Force, the space is 80 kilometres from the land surface and, according to the international definition, 100 kilometres away.
But neither Laika nor Albert II were the first animals to cross this man-made border.
On February 20, 1947, the V-2 rocket was launched at the White Sands Missile Range military base (New Mexico, USA). United States ), which carried, together with maize seeds, several vinegar flies (drosophila melanogaster). The rocket reached 109 kilometers from the Earth's surface, three minutes and ten seconds away, so they were the first flies to come into space. This V-2 rocket was captured by the Americans to the Germans at the end of World War II, as a war booty. Therefore, this feat was achieved thanks to the technology developed by the Nazis.
The objective of the mission of vinegar flies was to analyze the influence of these trips, especially height, acceleration and radiation. The immune system of flies and humans is similar and, in addition, flies reproduce rapidly, allowing to study the effects of space travel on living beings of several generations.
In the 1947 mission, when it reached space, the V-2 rocket launched the Blossom capsule and the capsule fell into the atmosphere. The friction of the air, first, and a parachute later, stopped the capsule and retrieved the first astronaut flies alive, unlike the poor Albert II and Laika.
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