Houston... We've Got Ants in Space! NASA Sends 800 Insects to ISS

First Posted: Jan 21, 2014 11:50 AM EST

It might seem down-right bizarre. Why on earth would NASA need some common ants? Eight-hundred of them, in fact. Well, it just so happens that these guys were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) and are now living there so that astronauts can observe just how they behave in low-gravity environments.

The experiment, launched by the private Colorado firm Bioserve Space Technologies, hopes to study the working principles of these insects and potentially use the same principles to build "intelligent" robots.

According to the Baylor College of Medicine, the ants were divided into eight colonies with each space grouped around the size of a computer tablet. Video cameras were then used to capture the ants working together while hanging out in space. When the images were sent back to earth, students from the college compared the information to similar ant colonies they studied in classrooms.

"When ant densities are high, each ant thoroughly searches one small area in a circular, 'random' walk," said Stephanie Countryman, program director of the University of Colorado Boulder's BioServe Space Technologies, which is behind the space ant mission, via a press release. "When ant densities are low, each ant searchers by walking in a relatively straight line, allowing it to cover more ground."

Once the researchers isolated the process that enables the ants to shift from one working formation to another, they could potentially be able to develop robots constructed using the same principles.

"We have devised ways to organize the robots in a burning building, or how a cellphone network can respond to interference, but the ants have been evolving algorithms for doing this for 150 million years," said biology professor Deborah Gordon of the International Space Station, via phys.org. "Learning about the ants' solutions might help us design network systems to solve similar problems."

The ants arrived via the Orbital Sciences delayed Cygnus to the ISS on January 12.

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Tagsspace, international space station, NASA