The sensory experience of growing a productive tree can also help reduce the psychological impact of long-term space travel. There’s a certain emotional connection to food that doesn’t come from a waterless space pantry. Spencer said the team opened APH every day to observe their vegetable-growing friends with all the tenderness of home gardeners. When it came time to harvest, they rolled their bounty around the ISS, taking selfies and enjoying the sight of the scattered fruit around the spacecraft. Even when the intense heat of that first bite made them wince, the astronauts reveled in the chili they ate along with rehydrated beef fajita, tomatoes and artichokes.
“We thought there was no heat, so [the peppers] Paul Bosland, who, with his colleagues at Chile Pepper Institute genetically modified Española Improved chili seeds grown at Plant Habitat-04. (They are New Mexico’s new extraterrestrial pride.)
Working with NASA, Bosland has grown a variety that can meet the nutritional needs of astronauts as well as the logistics of growing plants in space. Bosland’s Cross was designed with Mars in mind: Bred to mature early, compact, efficient in low light, resilient in low-pressure environments and contains three times the amount of Vitamin C of one oranges to prevent scurvy.
Every aspect of the plant’s growth cycle is mechanized. The seeds are grown with a fertilizer specially developed in low-soil arselite clay, and each quadrant is equipped with a salt-absorbing wick to protect the seedlings from scorching due to the salty residue of the fertilizer. fertilizer. After they germinated, the astronauts prune the trees until only four were left. More than 180 sensors control every aspect of their growing conditions, including adjusting the color of the lights to discourage their growth and keeping them at a controllable height by 2 feet.
Despite tightly controlled growing environments, microgravity has affected plants in a number of unforeseen ways. Without gravity, the flowers and their pollen-filled stamens would grow upwards. Ironically, that got in the way of the way APH is supposed to pollinate them—using fans that create soft airflows meant to mobilize pollen, the way a breeze would. . Instead, the astronauts had to fill the shoulders of mock bees, pollinating them one by one.
Microgravity also poses challenges for watering. As demonstrated by Canadian space agency, water operates in a different microgravity environment than on Earth. Unable to fall, flow down or fly up, water creates a layer of water that coats the surface of whatever it clings to. But clinging water can choke the roots; As Bosland notes, “horn peppers don’t like wet feet.”
This is one of the challenges APH engineer and Kennedy Space Center research scientist Oscar Monje have to tackle. Water recycling system in a closed cycle; The whole experiment used approximately the same amount of water as the office water cooler. The humidity sensor adjusts the exact amount of clinging to the root surface. Any water not absorbed by the plant then evaporates after the humidity sensor creates the arid environment that peppers crave. It is not a technology that is ready to be deployed, such as the moon or Mars. “APH is currently using an unsustainable irrigation system for crop production. But it’s good enough to conduct space biology experiments,” said Monje.
