Posted on 09/02/2014 7:12:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Experts say the geckos may have frozen to death after the heating system broke down, Russian news agencies report.
They were sent into space as part of a study into the effect of weightlessness on their sex lives and development.
"We can say with confidence that they died at least a week before the landing because their bodies were partly mummified," an official from Russia's Institute of Medical and Biological Problems told Itar-Tass news agency.
The Russian space agency has not yet outlined the cause of death.
But Interfax news agency, quoting an expert working on the mission, says preliminary data shows the geckos may have died after a malfunction with the satellite's heating system.
Drosophila fruit flies that were also travelling on the satellite, however, survived and had reproduced, Roscosmos said.
...
Soon after its launch, Roscosmos briefly lost contact with the satellite when the Foton-M4's engine stopped responding to ground control.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
I heard about this earlier. And I heard that they sent up one male with a number of females. So he was in the position of having to service multiple females.
Some liberals would not like this experiment because there was no provision for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered geckos. The whole experiment was “hetero normative”.
A frozen “love lizard”
Sex geckos. Our tax dollars at work. I guess now they’re frozen assets.
“I unfriend you”
Great. The geckos died, but the flies survived.
The space station will forever be infested with flies.
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