A new NASA mission to the International Space Station involves cargo that is more than a little unorthodox.
Science involves doing some crazy things sometimes, but NASA’s latest mission to the International Space Station involves sending an antibiotic-resistant superbug into orbit. The bug will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center launch complex.
NASA is working in conjunction with researcher Dr. Anita Goel to understand more about how superbugs mutate by observing it in a zero-gravity environment. Specifically, they’ll be sending up Methicillian-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA or staph.
The bug causes health problems like pneumonia and bloodstream infections. The ISS is the perfect place to conduct experiments on it, as it is basically an orbiting lab that already cares out hundreds of experiments each and every day.
“We are excited to put MRSA on the International Space Station and investigate the effects of microgravity on the growth and mutation patterns of these bugs,” Goel said at a NASA news conference recently “I have this hypothesis that microgravity will accelerate the mutation patterns. If we can use microgravity as an accelerator to fast-forward and get a sneak preview of what these mutations will look like, then we can essentially build smarter drugs on Earth.”