Fruit flies launched to space from China. Why?

China’s Tiangong space station has received new, unusual guests. While fruit flies are annoying in the kitchen, they can help solve some serious science mysteries while in space.

The small insect, which hatches from moist and rotting fruits, is a gold mine for scientists studying biological processes such as genetics and biomedical engineering.

Scientists turn to this insect because its genome is relatively simple, and it shares a significant portion of genes with humans.

This allows scientists to study genetic functions and diseases by manipulating their DNA quickly and efficiently across multiple generations. Also, flies have a short life cycle and reproduce quickly, making it easy to maintain them in a laboratory.

Now, the time has come for fruit flies to travel to space. On November 15th, the Tianzhou 8 resupply mission docked at the Chinese Tiangong space station, carrying 15 adult fruit flies and 40 pupae. These insects require minimum resources to sustain their livelihood, making them perfect test animals in space.

By bringing the fruit flies up to orbit, scientists expect to research in more depth how life beyond Earth’s magnetic field and gravity affects living organisms.

Earth’s magnetic field acts as a shield, protecting life from harmful cosmic rays and solar radiation. Without it, life on Earth might not exist. Understanding these effects is crucial for future space explorers traveling to areas without magnetic fields and potentially populating the space.

Scientists aboard the Tiangong space station have created a "sub-magnetic environment" and plan to use fruit flies to study its effects on health. They will compare the results from these simulated conditions in the space station to those observed in Earth's natural magnetic field.

“This in-space, sub-magnetic fruit fly experiment primarily aims to study the molecular mechanisms of fruit flies in microgravity and sub-magnetic environments, as well as their movement characteristics and biological rhythms,” said Zheng Weibo, a researcher from the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics on China Central Television.

In the future, scientists hope to send an even more complex animal – a mouse – to further investigate how microgravity affects nervous systems, bones, muscles, and the immune system.