Astronauts ate the first lettuce to be grown in space on August 10, 2015. "It tastes delicious," they said. The best thing was that it was as nutritious as a lettuce grown on earth.
Growing more fresh vegetables is a dream about to come true for astronauts who spend months without having a decent meal. To win the space race astronauts will have to know about vegetable crops.
Hence, the farming astronaut. Astronauts, who fix antennas in zero gravity, will now also be able to grow beautiful carrots.
This device is the older brother of Veggie, which enabled astronauts to grow the first lettuce during a space mission. All thanks to a small greenhouse called Advanced Plant Habitat.
It is the size of a mini-bar, has 180 sensors and 3 cameras that allow it to gather information on the plant's growth process on the international space station. All data will be processed by a computer named PHARMER, an acronym for Plant Habitat Avionics Real-Time Manager in Express Rack.
"It's a real science toolbox," stated Bryan Onate, an engineer at Kennedy Space Center that is heading the project. He told Popular Science that the astronauts would enjoy the fruits of their work.
The plants will grow thanks to the light generated by the machine, as space is pitch dark. Currently, they know the power that best suits the plant but they are still testing which light spectrum is best to stimulate their growth: blue, green, white, or red.
This gadget, which would bring joy to the crew's taste buds, would also save Nasa a lot of money on fuel, as sending a single piece of bread into space costs $8,750 dollars.
These are just two of the many efforts made by NASA to improve the diet of its astronauts, as it is one of the few amenities they have during their missions. However, Onate stated, this is also the preliminary phase of a much larger research: making life sustainable beyond Earth.
"These seedlings are the first steps we are taking to understand how to live in space more permanently," said Onate. The next step, in the not too distant future, could be planting crops on other planets.
Source: playgroundmag.net
