Hello! Welcome to Gardeners off World. The big news for space gardeners this week is that NASA has determined that the salads grown in Veggie are safe to eat. And a team of Russian researchers have developed a prototype for an orbital greenhouse. The Orbital Biological Automatic Module includes smart lighting to accelerate plant growth, specialised hydroponics, automated irrigation and harvesting solutions. It could be heading to the International Space Station (ISS) – “Humanity’s home in Low Earth Orbit” – in the next few years.
“The cultivation area is planned to be 30 m2. Furthermore, its cylindrical shape should help to adapt to different gravity conditions, which enables its use in the distant future, for instance, on the Moon or on Mars.
Another important issue is the selection of necessary and most suitable agricultural crops and their protection against pathogens in microgravity. We offer various types of lettuce, leeks, basil, and other crops for cultivation in the module.”
Magnitude.io’s ExoLab-7 experiment launched to the ISS on NG-13 with cowpea seedlings (Vigna unguiculata) inoculated with the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Rhizobium leguminosarum. It aims to investigate a biological solution to fertilising plants in space, as sending soil and fertilisers off-world would be too expensive.
A network of students and teachers from across North America, Europe, and Africa have analog ExoLabs in their classrooms. They began comparing their ground-based data with data from the in-orbit experiment last week.
“In addition to critical science supporting human space exploration, this experiment will also serve as an analog to climate change on Earth, with the elevated temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide onboard the
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