NASA was contemplating sending canaries into space to study them under zero gravity.
However someone realized that despite having sufficient water supplies, the birds could die of dehydration within a few hours. Consequently, the project was scrapped.
Provide adequate reasoning as to why these birds would die of dehydration.
While the NASA story is apocryphal, the nominal answer is that birds need gravity to swallow (food and water).
However, this is a bit of an exaggeration. While birds use gravity, they don't necessarily need it. For example, Japanese Quail chicks were hatched and lived on Space Station Mir, as the Audubon Society
reports. The link also shows a video of the quail chicks in zero-g doing something approaching flight, but with pitch, roll, and thrown in as well!
When ensconced in tiny harnesses, experiments showed that the quail could eat and drink. However, they faired poorly otherwise, being unable to latch onto anything.
Edited on October 30, 2022, 2:00 am
soln
