A followup on the tardigrade

Last month I featured tardigrades in round 13 of the Name That Animal series, and noted that the creatures are theoretically capable of surviving the vacuum of interstellar space.

Now there is experimental confirmation. As reported in Wired:

The toughest creature on Earth has survived a trip into space... [they] handled the voyage as though it were a dry spell on their local moss patch.

[The tardigrades travelled in] a tardigrade containment system attached to the Foton-M3 satellite, launched last September by a consortium of national space agencies.

The tardigrades had already been coaxed into an anhydrobiotic state, during which their metabolisms slow by a factor of 10,000. This allows them to survive vacuums, starvation, dessication and temperatures above 300 degrees Fahrenheit and below minus 240 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once in orbit, the tardigrade box popped open. Some were exposed to low-level cosmic radiation, and others to both cosmic and unfiltered solar radiation. All were exposed to the frigid vacuum of space.

Back on Earth, tardigrades that had basked in cosmic radiation revived and reproduced at rates comparable to an unexposed control group.