Youtube description:- "A Russian space capsule containing mice, sand eels, geckos, gerbils, snails, fish, plants and microflora has returned from a month long mission to space. The Bion-M craft made a parachute-assisted landing on a field in the Orenberg Region, 1,200 kilometres southeast of Moscow on Monday. A mobile laboratory and helicopters were dispatched to the landing zone for immediate testing of the effects of weightlessness on the animal's cell structure.

The Bion-M capsule, attached to a Soyuz 2-1A rocket, was blasted into space from Kazakhstan on April 19 for a study examining the effects of microgravity on the organism's skeleton, muscles, heart and nervous system. The rocket spun at an orbital height of 575 kilometres above Earth, surpassing that of the International Space Station.

The different species in the 'space menagerie' were divided up into five different containers for the 30 day journey, which not all the animals survived. An equipment failure killed eight gerbils onboard while half of the 53 mice also perished; all 15 geckos survived. Scientists hope the findings will help pave the way to the building of a planned base on the moon for unmanned flights to Mars.

The survivors will be studied by laboratories in the US, Europe, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. In February 2010, Iran launched a mouse, two turtles and some worms into space atop a rocket"