ISS’s power failure does not pose any risk to crew

Posting updates and photographs and tweeting about their experiences, both astronauts have made it an interesting run for space freaks. It is hoped that brightly colored Zinnia flowers will eventually bloom within the confines of the space station’s laboratory, sometime after New Year’s Eve. While vegetables have been grown in space before – most recently lettuce – this marks the first time astronauts have attempted to try their hand at growing flora instead of fauna.

The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III on the worldwide Space Station, or SAGE III on ISS, will be on dISPlay Wednesday, November 18 from 10 to 11:30 a.m.at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

In order to ensure that the flowers will grow properly, Lindgren will use red, green and blue LEDs and feed and water the plants, and after about 60 days, we should see the plants blooming.

The “Veggie” unit can also be used by astronauts for recreational gardening activities during deeper space missions including Mars. The process of growing the Zinnia flowers in orbit will provide vital information about plants that can be successfully grown in place. Veggie, alongside two plans of pads containing romaine seeds and one plan of zinnias, was conveyed to the station by SpaceX on the third payload resupply mission in April 2014.

Public-private cooperation is necessary to study the effects of long-term spaceflight on humans, either on the global Space Station (ISS) or its eventual replacement. Environmental and lighting parameters become more critical. In fact, current plans state that the popular red-hued fruit will be planted on the ISS as early as 2017.

Learning more about how to grow flowering plants will be the precursor to knowing enough to grow fruiting plants, such as tomatoes, noted Trent Smith, program manager of Veggie at Kennedy, in the release.