Human Flower Project

Friday, August 10, 2007

Zero-Gravity Gardening

With hundreds of thale cress seeds aboard the latest Endeavor spacecraft, astronauts will try growing a geeky garden over the next two months.

Clay Anderson gardens NASA-style

Photo: NASA via aftenposten



Don’t you know that space travelers get awfully tired of Tang!

Scientists, trying to put some fresh vegetables in orbit, have packed 1600 seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) aboard the Endeavor, which launched Wednesday, August 8. Over the next couple of months, the astronauts, with lots of guidance from the earthbound team of Norwegian botanists who supplied the seeds, will attempt to grow three generations of this flowering plant.

Arabidopsis thaliana

(thale cress on Earth)

Photo: NASA

One of the many purposes of the experiment is to determine the effects of antigravity (plus all that stale air, galactic turbulence, and artificial lighting) on growing plants. “This is vital knowledge for man’s trip to Mars,” a three year trip.  “The crew must be able to cultivate plants for eating while on the way to the red planet.” Vårskrinneblom (Thale cress in Norwegian) is “inedible” (which is saying quite a lot for in-flight food)  but since Arabidopsis reproduces easily and its genetic structure is well known to scientists, its behavior on board Endeavor should help the international Dobbs House figure out which tastier plants could survive in a rocket plot. For much more on the experiment, check details here, via NASA.

There will be time lapse video taken as the thale cress sprouts and matures “to study circumnutation (the successive bowing or bending in different directions of the growing tip of the stems and roots).” With each generation, plants will be dehydrated, some seed saved for sprouting the next space crop, some set aside for planting back here on Earth. American astronaut Clay Anderson will be the lead gardener (though with a hairnet not a straw hat). Let’s hope the NASA outfitters thought to put galluses on his spacesuit.