An international team of undergraduate students from the University of Aberdeen will today (October 21) present the findings of their Crabs in Space experiment undertaken at the European Space Agency Parabolic Flight Campaign in Bordeaux recently, at an open seminar to be held at 1.00pm, 7th Level, IMS Building, Foresterhill.
The University of Aberdeen's Molecular & Cell Biology team were selected along with 29 other projects for the annual Campaign from over 120 applicants from across Europe and were the only Scottish team to attend.
The students' experiment, the first of its kind, set out to non-invasively monitor activity in large nerve cells of crabs. The results of the experiment, in which crabs were subjected to microgravity in a diving plane, could one day help robots and humans work better in space.
When an aircraft follows a parabolic downward dive, its passengers begin to float about as if they are in zero, or near zero, gravity environment. It is one of the few ways of simulating the experience of space without leaving the atmosphere.
Eight common shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) from Aberdeen were chosen for the experiment because of their primitive method of adjusting their balance. Crabs' balancing systems have so much in common with those of humans, and the data collected may provide a good model for future robots designed to work in a zero-gravity location, and for further understanding the human response to such conditions.
The crabs in space programme is the work of Dr Peter Fraser, from the University's Zoology Department. He has been a crab expert for over 30 years and having found that crabs have balancing systems partially like humans, led the experiment with four undergraduate students from his cell biology and immunology class.
The crabs were wired to electrodes designed to measure activity in a particular part of their brains associated with their sense of balance. The parabolic dives placed the crabs both under a 2 Gs force, and also almost zero Gs for more than 20 seconds. At the same time, their tenuous grip was put under further pressure by placing them on an angled rotating plate.
The crustacean subjects appeared remarkably unperturbed by the whole experience, according to student researcher Roberto Araujo. He said: "They didn't move at all - but there was activity in the right part of their brains. The crabs are a very good model for our own vestigial balance system. We need to know more about this system, because balance in microgravity is a major problem in spaceflight."
While these crabs were released back into the wild following the experiments in Bordeaux, the team from Aberdeen hopes that more crabs will be gathered for further tests in a European Space Agency centrifuge.