LED-nurtured tomatoes on the space station
Added on 27 March 2023
ISS staff have been tending to the Red Robin dwarf tomatoes which seem to have come on abundantly since the crew began preparing to grow them in early December.
The new batch marks the first time that NASA has raised tomatoes for picking and eating on the spacecraft’s Veggie system, which is the longest running of at least three different horticultural facilities the agency runs on the craft.
NASA’s daily ISS blog site can go weeks or longer without mentioning any of the botany experiments, but in a recent 3-week period it issued no fewer than six accounts of astronauts harvesting, watering, or otherwise tending to the tomatoes.
The four astronauts who arrived March 3 started tomato picking straight away, as within a week all had reached into Veggie for a helping, NASA reported on March 9. It even pictured one of the new crew members — United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi — storing some of the tomatoes in a plastic bag on March 7.
In separate updates, NASA reported that U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio harvested tomatoes from Veggie on March 14 and 17, after reporting him watering the plants on Feb. 27. (In the Veggie system, water can be applied manually via a syringe, or mechanically through the PONDS — Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System). On March 13, U.S. astronaut Woody Hoburg checked leaves for microbial growth.
None of the updates conveyed great detail regarding the state of the fruits (tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables), nor did they specify which light recipe was in play. NASA is experimenting with two different spectra in the Veggie tomato project.
Image by Freepik
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