Astrobotany Ideas, Tips & Guides

Header image: Mars’ asteroid-sized satellites Deimos and Phobos. Image credit: ESA

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks to Vertical Veg Man Mark Ridsdill Smith, an expert on small space gardening on Earth. Small space gardening shares many of the same constraints facing space gardeners, although harvesting runner beans up a ladder isn’t one of them!

How does an organic gardener, firmly rooted in the soil, develop an interest in plants grown in space?

In episode 35, Emma the Space Gardener explores why bioregenerative life support systems are things we only see in the movies, and how far NASA has come in its quest to build a space salad machine.

NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement has just announced more details about the tree seeds they’ve packed into the Orion capsule for the upcoming Artemis I launch. They’re partnering with the USDA Forest Service in a STEM education project that sends a “new generation” of Moon Tree seeds to lunar orbit and connects Artemis I programming to Earth science, data literacy and citizen science orbit.

The long weekend has given me the chance to have a little play with video today, and this is the result.

Header image: An artist concept depicts a greenhouse on the surface of Mars. Plants are growing with the help of red, blue and green LED light bars and a hydroponic cultivation approach. Image credit: SAIC

Header image: Rob Ferl, left, and Anna-Lisa Paul looking at the plates filled part with lunar soil and part with control soils, now under LED growing lights. At the time, the scientists did not know if the seeds would even germinate in lunar soil. Credits: UF/IFAS photo by Tyler Jones

Yesterday, some of the plant scientists and engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center conducted a tour of their facilities, and a Q&A session for students participating in the Grow Beyond Earth project, in which they help to select the plant varieties best suited for spaceflight.

Header image: the launch of NASA SpaceX Crew-5 to the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA

With the launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission to the Moon just days away, Emma the Space Gardener has put together a guide covering the highlights of the mission for space gardeners. Learn about the space biology experiments on their way to their Moon, the seeds stashed away in the Orion capsule, and more!

As a nation mourns the death of its queen, I thought I would celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s lifelong love of plants and gardening.

NASA has put together a short video introducing the science experiments that are part of the upcoming Artemis I mission to the Moon.

In the latest episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with two young scientists, Pia Bensch and Nils Wörz, from a team of students working on a space plant experiment. Glücksklee will spend a month on the ISS next year, exploring the relationship between a clover-like plant (Medicago truncatula) and its symbiotic bacteria (Sinorhizobium meliloti).

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she talks to Dr Wieger Wamelink about how he became a space farmer, his experiments growing plants on Moon and Mars soil simulants, the importance of developing off-world ecosystems, and whether we can bring pet chickens to Mars!

Header image: Space vines from the CANES project. Image credit: Space Cargo Unlimited/ISVV

NASA has announced grants or cooperative agreements for seven exciting new space biology investigations to advance our understanding of how plants respond, acclimate and adapt to the space environment, in support of human space exploration.

Header image: Steve Gale (pilot) and Gail Iles (right) next to the Marchetti jet. Kieran Blair, Author provided

Getting a plant payload into space is rarely straightforward. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener chats with Dr Carl Carruthers, who started out sending his own research projects into space and then became Chief Scientist at Nanoracks. There he worked on projects to send palm tree seeds to the International Space Station for the UAE and to design a kit to turn school kids into space farmers. 

I was sowing some brassica seeds for the hydroponicum recently. It’s a fiddly job, they’re tiny seeds and I’m sowing them into wet compost plugs. If my fingers get wet then the seeds would rather stick to me than the compost! At one point I dropped a seed packet down onto the table, so I could wipe my hands, and it occurred to me that this simple task – a ritual gardeners on Earth do so often – would be impossible in space.

I’ve been trying to talk to the ChatGPT about space plants. Our first “conversation” was mostly it referring to its notes. When I tried to get it to choose a fantasy space plant, it couldn’t. Since it can theoretically deal with hypothetical situations, I thought I would try and get it to look ahead to the future:

If we want to create a permanent presence in space, on the Moon or Mars, we need to learn how to use the resources we find there. Space people call it “in-situ resource utilisation”; on Earth, it would just be “living off the land”. It’s just not practical or sustainable to completely supply those missions from Earth.

Earlier in the year, I was talking about Lunaria One, a space start-up with plans to grow plants on the Moon in 2025.

At the end of last year, NASA published a round-up of its Best Space Station Science Imagery of 2022. All of the images are worth a look, but of course I am particularly interested in the ones that involve space plants:

The next resupply flight to the International Space Station (ISS) is SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services Mission 26 (CRS-26), due to launch from Kennedy Space Center at 2:20 p.m. ET (19:20 GMT) on Saturday 26th November. If the launch cannot go ahead on Saturday, there’s a backup launch opportunity on Sunday, November 27 at 1:58 p.m. ET (18:58 GMT).

The last episode of 2022 is here, and it’s a good one! I’ve been talking with Amy Padolf and Carl Lewis from the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden about their citizen science/education project Growing Beyond Earth® (GBE). GBE is really something special, because it allows school students to collect data that influences which plants NASA grows in space.

In November 2022, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) sent sorghum and Arabidopsis seeds to the International Space Station. The seeds have been exposed to life in space – inside and outside of the station – to see whether the unique environment will encourage helpful mutations. 

My first conversation with the ChatGPT chatbot about space plants was a bit… meh. So I thought I would ask it about its fantasy space plant. It’s a question I like to ask all of the guests on my podcast, and I’m as fascinated by the way they go about choosing as I am with the species they choose.

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Dr Jenny Mortimer from the University of Adelaide, one of the scientists involved with the new Plants for Space (P4S) project. Jenny currently has a bit of an obsession with duckweed, a plant with superpowers that could be right at home in space!

Header image: Growing food in space will rely on innovative agricultural technologies. (NASA)

In 2013, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins was on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of Expedition 37/38. He’d launched in a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy. 

Header image: Space Salad, credit: University of Adelaide

In 2018, the German Space Agency launched a particularly ambitious project on a year-long space mission – a satellite equipped with two greenhouses designed to grow tiny tomatoes at gravity levels equivalent to those found on the Moon and Mars. But it was more than just an experiment to grow plants in space. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener explores Eu:CROPIS, a project to develop a biological life-support system… for tomatoes.

It’s Valentine’s Day on Earth, and love is definitely in the recycled air in the Orbital Garden! Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores the history of roses in space, and an art project that imagines a future for roses on Mars.

In episode 50 of Gardeners of the Galaxy, I spoke with Amy Padolf and Carl Lewis from the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden about Growing Beyond Earth, the education program in which students collect data about plants for NASA.

Anne McCaffrey’s sci-fi novel Pegasus in Space is the third part of a trilogy set on Earth in the latter stages of the 21st century.