Nathaniel Szewczyk and colleagues are experts in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, this popular little organism has been the subject of countless biological studies including Nobel-prize winning efforts. As such, it is being developed as a model system for space biology.
According to Szewczyk, the chemically defined liquid medium, C. elegans Maintenance Medium (CeMM), allows it to be cultivated automatically and experiments to be carried out on it during spaceflight research. His team grew CeMM for experiments to be carried out on board STS-107, space shuttle Columbia.
When tragedy struck Columbia, a massive recovery effort was started and hardware containing the CeMM experiment was actually retrieved from the debris.
Szewczyk explains that live animals were observed in four of the five recovered canisters, which had survived on both types of media. “These data demonstrate that CeMM is capable of supporting C. elegans during spaceflight. They also demonstrate that animals can survive a relatively unprotected reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, which has implications with regard to the packaging of living material during space flight, planetary protection, and the interplanetary transfer of life,” Szewczyk explains.
You can read more about this rather unusual rescue mission in the journal Astrobiology 5, 690—705
Astrobiology.