How Does Your Space Garden Grows?

How Does Your Space Garden Grows?

Astronauts from International Space Station show us how to grow a garden in space.

Friday morning, astronauts onboard International Space Station have succeded to show us how plants grow in space, by harvesting three varieties of leafy greens and installing their next generation of plant research.

Three different plant varietes are simultaneously growing in the Veggie chamber for the first time. On the same day, October 27, Joe Acaba (astronaut on ISS) harvested Mizuna mustard, Waldmann’s green lettuce and Outredgeous Red Romaine lettuce, successfully providing a salad for himself and for the rest of the crew.

“It’s an impressive harvest. Joe did a great job! As a continuation of our Veg-03 tech demo efforts, we wanted to try something a little bit different. Building on some of our current ground testing, we decided to attempt a mixed crop. We were hoping that the visual diversity of the plants would be more enjoyable to the crew, as well as the variety of flavors offered by the different types of leafy greens.” said Veggie project manager Nicole Dufour.

Read also: What Happens When You Play With A Fidget Spinner On International Space Station

“Four power feeds to the plant habitat will be turned on and the Kennedy team will monitor the system’s Plant Habitat Avionics Real-Time Manager, or PHARMER, for a response”

NASA is making a major progress by harvesting plants on board of ISS and they say this unique system provides real-time telemetry, remote commanding and photo downlink to the team at Kennedy.

A test unit, or prototype, of NASA's Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) with its first initial grow test in the Space Station Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The taller plants are dwarf what and the smaller plants are Arabidopsis. Developed by NASA and ORBITEC of Madison, Wisconsin, the APH is the largest plant chamber built for the agency. Photo credit: NASA
A test unit, or prototype, of NASA’s Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) with its first initial grow test in the Space Station Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The taller plants are dwarf what and the smaller plants are Arabidopsis. Developed by NASA and ORBITEC of Madison, Wisconsin, the APH is the largest plant chamber built for the agency. Photo credit: NASA

“The test will help us to determine if the planting procedure is good and the habitat is operating as designed. The results of plant growth in the habitat will be compared with the results of tests completed in the control unit here at Kennedy.” said Bryan Onate , project manager.

Learn more about growing plants in space from the next video:

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