Astronauts Get First Taste of Veggies Harvested in Space

NASA astronauts on the worldwide Space Station (ISS) have grown the first ever vegetables in space-and are about to eat them.

Astronauts on the global Space Station will eat fresh lettuce Monday grown in space, according to NASA. He then had to clean the lettuce with citric-acid based sanitizing wipes. The other half of the produce will be packaged, frozen and sent back to Earth at a later date where it will be analyzed by scientists. NASA has been testing the Veggie system since last year, when the first plants were planted in May and harvested 33 days later.

“The Veggie experiment is now the only experiment we are supporting which involves evaluating the effects of plant life on humans in space“, said Alexandra Whitmire, a scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre”.

The researchers will further study how these fresh foods which are a great source of nutrition with an added advantage of radiation protection will provide psychological benefit to the astronauts in space.

The vegetable plant growth system was created by Orbital Technologies Corp (ORBITEC) in Madison, Wisconsin, and trialed at Kennedy before the space crew took off. It was delivered to the ISS on April 2014 through the resupply mission of SpaceX. The seeds had been on the station for 15 months before being activated. A second lot of Veg-01 plant pillows were activated by Kelly on July 8, which after growing for 33 days were harvested.

Astronaut Kjell Lindgren tweeted a photo of the lettuce growing on the space station, with the caption: “Almost sad to eat these tomorrow”. Green LEDs don’t emit as much light, but NASA says they’re included so that the lettuce looks like lettuce instead of “weird purple plants”. “I think that plant systems will become important components of any long-duration exploration scenario”, Dr Massa said. The plants grow under red, blue and green LED light in an open-air environment (the veggies had to be tested before consumption to ensure there were no odd particles in the space air).