Unexpected guest on Discovery ship

The flight to Discovery's International Space Station (ISS) has an unexpected "astronaut", a bat, at the time the ship is launched into the air from the Kennedy State Space Center in Florida, America.

According to NASA, a bat clung to Discovery's fuel tank by the time the ship was about to take off on March 15.

Infrared image capturing a bat on the ship's Discovery

NASA's flight report states that "The analysis of images at the time of the launch and the launch of Discovery confirms that the bat has clung to the shipboard at least until the time the ship left The bat has repeatedly changed the position on the train at the time the timer is started, but it has not flown from the train. The infrared images show the bat is still alive and it does not frozen as many people think ".

Experts say that when the bat attaches to the fuel tank (containing 2 million liters of extremely low temperature liquid hydrogenation) it has broken a wing. Currently, it is not clear what happens to the bat, but NASA believes his "trip" into the universe is very short.

This bat is not the first animal to "travel" into the universe. One of his companions used to cling to the fuel tank on the Endeavor ship in 1996, another one was seriously injured when clinging to the Columbia ship in 1998.