space laboratory

The latter was also the first all-private mission to the space laboratory.

As its name suggests, POLAR-2 is a follow-up to POLAR, a smaller detector that flew to an earlier, smaller Chinese prototype space laboratory.

A new space laboratory means researchers can repeat experiments that have been conducted on the ISS to test whether the results can be reproduced, says de Souza, who hopes the findings will be made public.

The research, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, notes that dried Deinococcus bacteria were able to survive for three years outside the ISS on aluminum plates outside the floating space laboratory.

Space lab burns up China’s orbiting space laboratory Tiangong-2 came to a fiery end in an operation that saw its remnants crash into the Pacific Ocean on 19 July.