ESA Ideas, Tips & Guides

Welcome to my new weekly round-up of the most exciting interplanetary gardening news!

Header image: Space broccoli. Image credit: NASA/Don Pettit

Header image: UK astronauts Rosemary Coogan, John McFall and Meganne Christian. Image credit: UK Space Agency

Header image: The Expose-R2 facility outside the International Space Station. Image credit: Roscosmos.

ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli will carry a special greenhouse during his expedition aboard the International Space Station and he invites young science enthusiasts to carry out experiments there with him.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps important spacecraft Arrivals and Departures and learns about growing nutrients and medicines in space. There’s a new plant experiment running on the International Space Station, and exciting news from ESA.

Welcome interplanetary gardeners! This week’s Gardeners off World starts with a little video Boeing has put together of the inside of the crew cabin on the recent Starliner test flight (the one that took tree seeds into space). You can see Rosie the instrumented mannequin, but the highlight is watching astronaut Snoopy float about as the spacecraft reaches orbit, and then plop back down into his seat during the descent!

Growing lettuce on the Moon is a step closer, as a French start-up has successfully grown lettuce in simulated lunar soil.

Hello, and welcome to Gardeners Off World! I am writing this from lockdown, and you’re probably reading it from lockdown, too. The good news for UK gardeners is that it’s still OK for most people to do some gardening – and that includes people who grow their food on an allotment.

Welcome to a special Valentine’s edition of Gardeners off World, where love is definitely in the recycled air!

ESA’s ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) held their annual open day over the weekend. One of the projects on display was part of the MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) project, which is investigating ways to use microbiological cells, chemicals, catalysts, algae, bacteria and plants to process waste and deliver continuous supplies of oxygen, water and food.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! Emma’s guest on the show this week is Dr Javier Medina, a Space Plant Biologist with the Spanish National Research Council. He talks about why it’s essential we grow plants in space, what we’ve learned from his experiments, and when there might be a greenhouse on the Moon!

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma talks to Grace Crain, a researcher on the MELiSSA project developing circular life support systems. 

On Saturday, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer shared a taste of home with the rest of the crew of the International Space Station (ISS). Maurer is from Saarland, a forested, southwestern German state. Saarland is named after the Saar River, a tributary of the Moselle, and Saarland is considered part of the greater Moselle wine region.

Thomas Pesquet’s Alpha mission is about to bloom! The ESA astronaut will soon be growing flowers on the International Space Station, in an experiment called “Graines d’Eklo”.

NASA’s Artemis I mission to the Moon could launch as soon as 29th August. It’s time to get to know the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion capsule.

In January 1992, Space Shuttle Discovery took the first-ever British plant experiment in microgravity into space.

The physical effects of spending time in space are very similar to the natural ageing process. In fact, we can learn a lot about ageing by studying how microgravity affects astronauts. But that’s expensive, and it’s much cheaper for people to stay in bed!

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.

NASA’s Artemis I mission has just passed by the Moon and moved into the distant retrograde orbit that will take it far out into deep space. The Orion capsule is due to return to Earth on 11th December.

The UK Space Agency has announced that Tim Peake is stepping down as an active European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and taking on an ambassadorial role for space.

Remember EDEN ISS? It was a greenhouse built inside a shipping container that spent several years in Antarctica. The idea was to help develop controlled environment agriculture technologies for use in hostile environments on Earth, the International Space Station (ISS), and future spacecraft and Moon/Mars bases.