The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have managed to efficiently domesticate salad crop — pink romaine lettuce — that is freed from disease-causing microbes and suitable for eating, and is no less than as nutritious as Earth-grown crops. This feat was achieved regardless of being grown beneath decrease gravity and extra intense radiation than on Earth.
Apart from a welcome change in weight loss plan, contemporary produce would offer astronauts with extra potassium in addition to nutritional vitamins Ok, B1, and C – vitamins which are much less ample in pre-packaged rations and have a tendency to degrade throughout long-term storage.
Additionally, rising crops can be particularly helpful on long-distance house missions, just like the upcoming Artemis-III missions (scheduled to land people on the lunar South pole by 2024), the present SpaceX programme, and NASA’s first crewed mission to Mars, deliberate for the late 2020s.
“The ability to grow food in a sustainable system that is safe for crew consumption will become critical as NASA moves toward longer missions. Salad-type, leafy greens can be grown and consumed fresh with few resources,” said Dr Christina Khodadad, a researcher on the Kennedy Space Center, in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
Astronauts in house dwell on processed, pre-packaged house rations comparable to fruits, nuts, chocolate, shrimp cocktails, peanut butter and rooster, and many others.
These have usually been sterilized by heating, freeze drying, or irradiation to make them final and key a problem for the US Space Agency NASA has been to determine the best way to develop protected, contemporary meals onboard.
Between 2014-2016, lettuce was grown on board the ISS from surface-sterilized seeds inside Vegetable Production Systems (nicknamed “Veggie”), progress chambers outfitted with LED lighting and a watering system, particularly designed to develop crops in house.
The crops grew undisturbed contained in the Veggie models for 33 to 56 days, till crew members ate a part of the mature leaves (with no in poor health results).
The the rest was deep-frozen till transport again to Earth for chemical and organic evaluation.
Space-grown lettuce was comparable in composition to the Earth-grown controls, besides that in some (however not all) trials, space-grown plant tissue tended to be richer in parts comparable to potassium, sodium, phosphorus, sulphur, and zinc, in addition to in phenolics, molecules with confirmed antiviral, anticancer, and anti inflammatory exercise.
Further exams confirmed that the leaves by no means carried any harmful micro organism recognized to often contaminate crops, comparable to coliform E. coli, Salmonella, and S. aureus, whereas the numbers of fungal and mold spores on them was additionally within the regular vary for produce safe to eat.
The authors stated that lettuce grown in space-borne Veggie models is suitable for eating.
“The International Space Station is serving as a test bed for future long-duration missions, and these types of crop growth tests are helping to expand the suite of candidates that can be effectively grown in microgravity,” stated Dr Gioia Massa, challenge scientist at Kennedy Space Center.
This post was last modified on March 8, 2020 12:47 pm