They’ve achieved it with the Vegetable Production System (known as Veggie), which grows plants on “pillows” using an array of LED lights. Plants are grown in expandable units that use red, green and blue LEDs to mimic sunlight and grow plants.
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Adrian Lane’s call to the ISS only lasted 45 seconds, so depending on the weather conditions you may only have time to say a few things the space station before the connection is lost.
After clicking their lettuce leaves like wine glasses, three astronauts tasted them with a bit of Italian balsamic vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil.
Also thanks to the weightlessness of space, the lettuce didn’t not grow in a traditional plot of soil.
For starters, if we ever want to truly colonise the Moon, Mars, or further beyond, constantly bringing the colony food from Earth isn’t viable. And their answer was ‘teamwork, ‘ saying teamwork is one of the most important skills they need on the global Space Station, Duncan said, adding that the answer solidified the Challenger Center at Paducah’s practice of teaching teamwork skills to its students.
“We’re in good shape right now, but if for some reason HTV didn’t get here, we get pretty low on certain consumables probably in late September, early October timeframe”, Kelly said.
Kelly is in the middle of his record-breaking Year in Space mission with NASA.
Finally, like virtually all of NASA’s outer-space experiments, this is set to have real-world implications.
Other planned methods of growing plants in space include vertical agriculture, in which plants are grown in hydroponic shelves.
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For the Soviet Union, frozen urine that was vented into space from the Mir space station’s toilet was hitting the station’s solar panels and damaging them.
