Bion 3

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On display at the Moscow Space Museum. The circular viewport was installed for display purposes.

Bion 3 (Cosmos 782) was a Bion satellite. It was the first joint U.S.-Soviet biomedical research flight. It carried fourteen experiments prepared by seven countries in all, with participation from scientists in France, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

It included a centrifuge with revolving and fixed sections in which identical groups of animals, plants, and cells could be compared. The subject animals included white rats and tortoises. The effects of aging on fruit fly livers and plant tissues with grafted cancerous growths were also studied.

Launched from Plesetsk on November 25, 1975, the biosatellite was recovered in Siberia on December 15. The mission ended after 19.5 days.

More than 20 different species were flown on the mission, incluing twenty-five unrestrained male Wistar rats, fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), carrot tissues, and 1000 embryos of the fish Fundulus heteroclitus (a small shallow water minnow). A U.S. radiation dosimeter experiment was also carried out without using biological materials. This was the only Bion mission where the United States provided some of the biological specimens. [1]