America remains the unquestioned leader when it comes to space exploration, but in a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations he said future efforts will look like the worldwide Space Station, an global effort that has kept humans continuously living and working in space for the past 15 years.
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Kelly has been aboard the global Space Station for a record-breaking one-year period as part of a study to measure the impact a year in space can have on a person, USA Today reported. The process of growing the Zinnia flowers in orbit will provide vital information about plants that can be successfully grown in place.
After a long wait, the Zinnia project has now been activated by Taiwan-born Kjell N. Lindgren, a NASA astronaut who is a crew member of the ISS’s Expedition 44/45.
Many people are aware that NASA has partnered with several other nations to build and maintain the global Space Station.
This is the first time ever that a flowering crop experiment has been grown on the ISS. “Growing a blossoming product is more testing than growing a vegetative harvest, for example, lettuce”, said Gioia Massa, NASA Kennedy Space Center payload researcher for Veggie. Environmental and lighting parameters spin some-more critical. Lindgren will turn on the red, blue and green LED lights, actuate the water and supplement system to Veggie, and screen the plant growth.
The Zinnias will grow for 60 days, twice as long as the first and second crop of red romaine lettuce that grows on the space station. The LED light will be kept on for ten hours straight and then off for the next fourteen hours to stimulate the Zinnias to flower. The astronaut aboard the ISS took the picture while looking at the Indus river valley in Pakistan and clicked the border with a Nikon D4 digital camera using a 28-millimeter lens on September 23.
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The scientists also wish to determine other important aspect of plant growth in space by observing the flowers. It will also assistance yield insurance opposite space radiation.
