Today (May 20th) is Pick Strawberries Day in America. It’s a bit early in the UK – the strawberry season is only just beginning, ramping up to be ready for Wimbledon in June.
So, given that I’m not going to pick any strawberries from my garden today, I thought I’d look at whether astronauts will be picking space strawberries in the future.
Scientists and astronauts are getting pretty good at growing salad leaves in Veggie on the ISS and even managed a bouquet of zinnias. However, getting plants to flower and successfully grow fruit in space is still a challenge. (One that the Plant Habitat-04 experiment, growing space chiles in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), will investigate later this year.)
However, strawberries usually feature on the crop lists put together by researchers for hypothetical space farms. The plants are compact, the fruits are sweet and tasty, and the antioxidants in berries may help protect astronauts from radiation damage.
In 2005, NASA was growing several kinds of strawberries from around the world at the Space Life Sciences (SLS) Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center. They were testing varieties to see which would best support astronaut crews physically and psychologically.
“Once they leave and are a few million miles away from Earth, anything they bring from home is going to have a huge psychological effect. For years, plants have been used as therapy. Being able to complete their tasks and then have a few hours (or minutes) to sit back and smell the aroma of fresh grown plants, smell the aroma of growing strawberries, work with them and talk with them, the benefits are just immeasurable.”
The researchers tested “short day” strawberry varieties, which can be induced to flower under low-light conditions,
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