By RIA Novosti
Moscow : The re-entry module of the Foton-M bio-satellite successfully landed at 11.58 a.m. Moscow time (7.58 a.m. GMT) Wednesday in northern Kazakhstan, RIA Novosti reported.
The satellite was launched Sep 14 on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan carrying gerbils, snails, cockroaches and many other creatures sealed in special containers and filmed by a video camera during the flight, as part of experiments carried out by the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP).
Scientists say that some of creatures might have been killed during the landing, although the majority of creatures aboard the satellite have survived earlier trips into space.
“The 12-day satellite mission was a success and all the scheduled experiments were carried out,” the flight director, Nikolai Sokolov, said.
The first unmanned Foton-type spacecraft was introduced in 1985 by the erstwhile Soviet Union and was patterned on the famous Vostok spacecraft that carried the world’s first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.