The Winner!

On August 30th, I published a complete timeline of all animals put into space between 1946 and 2010. It detailed all the species and how they traveled, from the first fruit flies up to the most recent humans, with every dog, cat, rat and monkey in between!

The Space Animals Timeline HTML page connected to that blog post was pretty exhaustive... if you press "Print Preview", it comes out to 12 full pages! At the very bottom of page 12, I posed a trivia question... a pretty easy one, I thought... but mostly I just wanted to see if anyone would actually read that far, LOL!

The answer was inside the timeline, of course: In April of 1998, STS-90, a mission of Space Shuttle Columbia, set a biological payload milestone, when over 2,000 creatures resided aboard the orbiter for 16 days. Seven humans operated NEUROLAB, where they studied space adaptation syndrome, vestibular function, adaptation of central nervous systems and the ability to sense location in the absence of gravity. On board animal containment facilities held 18 pregnant mice, 1514 crickets, 135 snails, 233 fish and 152 rats.

This past Thursday, Rebekah Maral of Port Washington, Wisconsin emailed me with a perfect response... what a reader! She provided her address and will soon be the proud owner of a limited edition NASA employee T-shirt... good job, Rebekah, look for it in the mail!