At 2:16 am yesterday morning (BST, 9:16 pm Friday EDT), Northrop Grumman launched a Cygnus resupply spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). It’s scheduled to dock with the ISS around 10:20 am tomorrow. The company’s tradition is to name each Cygnus after an individual who has played a pivotal role in human spaceflight. The NG-14 capsule is named the S.S. Kalpana Chawla, in memory of the NASA mission specialist who died in the Columbia tragedy in 2003. Kalpana Chawla was the first woman born in India to go to space.
So what’s onboard?
For space gardeners, the most exciting part of the payload is a radish experiment! The Plant Habitat-02 experiment aims to grow two sets of radishes in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), which is larger than the Veggie growing system. Radishes are an ideal candidate because of their quick growth, and the experiment will explore how different light and “soil” conditions affect growth. The results should help to optimise radish growth in space and provide an assessment of their nutrition and flavour. The ultimate goal is to develop ways to produce food in space and help sustain crews on long-duration missions, including those to the Moon and Mars.
I’m hoping to have the scientist behind that experiment, Dr Karl Hasenstein, on an upcoming episode of the Gardeners of the Galaxy podcast, so stay tuned for that!
Veggie and the Advanced Plant Habitat allow researchers to grow plants to a reasonable size. But a lot of space plant experiments (and biology experiments generally) take place in Petri plates. Photos taken during the experiments allow researchers on the ground to see their progress. The Spectrum-001 investigation is about improving those images, for a better understanding of
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