Fresh from the success that allowed astronauts to eat lettuce grown in space in August, NASA’s Veggie plant-growing hardware on the International Space Station (ISS) has been reloaded with new plant pillows – this time sown with Zinnia ‘Profusion’.
These Zinnias will take twice as long as the lettuce to grow – 60 days in total – and are expected to be in bloom in the New Year. They will have a special regimen of 10 hours of LED light followed by 14 hours of darkness.
It may seem slightly frivolous to grow flowers in space, but it makes perfect sense. Not only will there be a noticeable effect on crew morale (and this is one of the facets of the experiment that NASA is tracking), but getting plants to flower in space is one of the things we need to crack if we want to be able to feed ourselves in off-world environments. Whilst we’re obviously well on the way to being able to grow salad in space, it’s only a small part of our diet. Fruiting plants, such as tomatoes, have to flower (and those flowers have to be pollinated) before they will fruit. There’s also a question of whether pollen will be problematic in an entirely enclosed environment.
And, of course, if we want to be able to continually farm in space, we need to be able to take plants through their whole lifecycle, from seeds to flowers and back to seeds.
The first extraterrestrial seeds were grown on the Russian Mir space station in the 1980s. These were Thale Cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant often used in scientific experiments because a) it has a very short lifecycle and b) it was the first plant to have its genome sequenced. Here on Earth, it’s better known as a weed, and technically it’s edible – it’s a Brassica.
You probably wouldn’t want to eat too much of
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