Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps the latest space plant news and then talks about some of the seeds with space stories.
21.08.2023 - 11:40 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
The long weekend has given me the chance to have a little play with video today, and this is the result.
It is inspired by a 2009 press release from the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS):
Because of the distinct lack of grocery stores in outer space, scientists are looking for ways to provide food for long-term space missions.
Desmond G. Mortley and colleagues from the Center for Food and Environmental Systems for Human Exploration of Space, G.W. Carver Agricultural Experiment Station, and the Kennedy Space Center undertook a study on microgravity’s effects on sweetpotato. The study findings were published in the Journal of American Society for Horticultural Science.
Seeds of several crops have been grown in microgravity, but this was the first test for plants grown from cuttings. Cuttings grow roots faster than do seeds, and sweetpotato cuttings regenerate very easily. This made them ideal for the study, half of which took place on a 5-day space mission on the shuttle Columbia.
The other half of the cuttings remained on earth as the ground-based control group at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Conditions were similar for both growing environments.
Both environments resulted in similar root growth development, though the microgravity roots tended to grow perpendicular to the cuttings. The number of roots was almost the same in both samples. However, the length of roots grown in microgravity was significantly greater. Microgravity cuttings contained significant accumulation of soluble sugars and higher starch concentration than ground cuttings; the starch grains appeared smaller in microgravity samples.
Despite these differences, the study was successful in showing that stem cuttings, at least those started in
Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps the latest space plant news and then talks about some of the seeds with space stories.
Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, which seems like a good time to take the next step on our space adventure. You choose the topic of bees in space, so here we go!
While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.
One of the nerdy things I enjoy doing in my spare time is researching the first seeds to have made it into space. This is what I have found so far:
From the moment humans started to reach for the skies, we have used other species from Earth to test what’s safe and what happens to life away from its natural habitat on the planet’s surface.
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.
When Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 flew into space on Sunday, it carried one billionaire passenger and three tubes filled with plants.
Header image: NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio uses a video camera to photograph the Ant Forage Habitat. Image credit: NASA
Worms were the only survivors when space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. Caenorhabditis elegans, nematodes, had been sent into space to test a synthetic nutrient solution. Their naturally short life-span meant that the survivors were several generations removed from the worms that were blasted into space at the beginning of the mission. Nematodes experiments have also been conducted on the International Space Station (ISS), looking at the effect of microgravity – it turns out that these worms can suffer muscle mass loss in the same way as humans do. Nematodes weren’t the only worms included on that fateful mission; among the student experiments (which included space bees) was one that aimed to investigate mealworms (Tenebrio molitor). Sadly they didn’t survive.
This new short video from the University of Florida Space Plants Lab explains how and why they’re studying how plants react to being in microgravity.
I imagine the Apollo 11 astronauts had plenty to do while they were hurtling towards the Moon, but from a bystander’s perspective it was probably pretty dull stuff. Still, it’s Day 3 of the mission, so let’s have a look at what they’ve got stashed away in their space age picnic basket.
In this NASA image from January 2020, you can see Lashelle Spencer taking measurements on ‘Red Robin’ dwarf tomato plants. Lashelle is a plant scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and this photo was taken inside the Plant Processing Area in the spaceport’s Space Station Processing Facility.