Gardeners of the Galaxy Mission Report: 23 July 2024
Your weekly round-up of astrobotany news and adventure. This week we've got astronauts studying how to water space plants, a new lunar analog facility under construction and GotG’s fourth birthday!
Hello, Gardeners of the Galaxy! Welcome to this week's Mission Report.
The Starliner astronauts are making good use of their time on the International Space Station (ISS), working on the Plant Water Management 5 and 6 experiments, which launched to the ISS on the SpaceX CRS-29 cargo resupply mission in November 2023.
(You may remember Principal Investigator Prof Mark Weislogel from Portland State University, who joined me to chat about the previous PWM experiments in episode 29.)
Here on Earth, gravity plays an important role in plant watering. In the absence of gravity, water behaves in ways that really don’t help plants – clinging to roots or shoots and suffocating them or oozing out of the root zone to leave parts parched and dying. PWM aims to use clever engineering and weaker forces such as surface tension to control how water moves in microgravity.
Some of these technologies are already in use for liquid fuels on rockets and liquid coolants and space radiators, but they haven’t been applied to plant watering. The ultimate goal is to replicate passive watering systems on Earth, so that (e.g.) a growing system could be launched into space and initiated from the ground, producing a crop ready for astronauts arriving later.
The fun thing about the PWM experiments (which most news coverage gets wrong) is that although they’re about watering plants, they don’t involve watering plants. Instead, they use coloured liquids and absorbent materials to demonstrate the fluid flows.
Learn more: Prof Weislogel discussed Plant Water Management on the Houston We Have a Podcast last year, and there’s a full transcript on the site.
What’s the Happy Haps?
Gardeners of the Galaxy is turning 4! I hope you’ll join me in celebrating on Saturday, as I will be releasing a special episode of the show (whilst stuffing my face with cake and wearing my new GotG t-shirt). If I didn’t have an audience, I wouldn’t have a show, so thanks for your support! And if you’re in a generous mood, you can buy me a birthday cup of coffee!
The 3rd annual Space Ecology Workshop will be held virtually October 11-12, 2024. You can expect this free conference to be two full days packed with fascinating speakers on the cutting edge of bioastronautics, space life sciences, and closed-loop living!
Here's the pre-registration link for both attendees and potential presenters: https://forms.gle/658B5CD2Rk9yJ9f76
Find out more:Space Ecology Workshop
You can now register for the 28th Biennial ELGRA conference, which is taking place in Liverpool (UK) in September. Session topics include Plants for Life Support Systems (ECLSS) in Space and Cell Biology, Genetics and omics.
Find out more: ELGRA – European Low Gravity Research Association
Australia's National Science Week 2024 runs from 10-18 August, with thousands of events reaching more than 2 million people. The ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S) is running a series of immersive events called 'The Martian Garden', exploring how we can create sustainable new ecosystems off-world and select and adapt plant and microbial species to survive and thrive.
Find out more: National Science Week
In other news…
This week, the first lunar sandbag tapping - opening the bags to distribute the sand - marked an important step in preparing the new lunar analogue facility in Cologne, Germany. LUNA will use a 700 square metre area filled with about 900 tonnes of volcanic sand to closely replicate the Moon’s surface.
LUNA is set to open this September. Next year, though, it will also integrate the EDEN-LUNA greenhouse, the refurbished EDEN-ISS greenhouse previously used in Antarctica. EDEN-LUNA will enhance lunar simulation and test closed-loop life support systems.
Read more: As the dust settles – first sandbag tapping at LUNA
The Guardian has an interview with US navy microbiologist Anca Selariu, one of the four crew members who have just completed the year-long CHAPEA 1 analog mission. On the topic of their hydroponic farm, she said: ““To me personally, it was such a joy to see and touch a living, green thing, because that is something that you miss the most while you’re away from Earth. My connection to Earth, and the deep feeling of being a true Earthling, a living entity from the planet Earth, you really feel it very deeply into your core and you really understand what that means and how incredibly important that connection really is.”
Read more: Life on Mars ‘absolutely exhilarating’: Nasa scientist’s year in a simulation
Danny Wallace’s love song to growing your own includes a cameo from Dr Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger of the Vienna University of Technology, an expert in space greenhouses and astro gardens, and the author of Architecture for Astronauts. Space travellers, she says, come to think of the plants they grow in space stations as “companions and pets and almost imaginary friends. They provide a daily pleasure. In space, fresh food is more valuable than gold or diamonds. Those, you cannot eat …”
Read more: My search for the perfect veg – from my greenhouse to the Cotswolds and even into orbit
Fifty-five years ago, the Apollo 11 astronauts were on their way home from the Moon. Newspapers.com has been exploring how the British press reported the giant leap for mankind and how the British public was swept up in the excitement.
Read more: Where Were You When? The Moon Landing 1969
An Italian-led team reports that there's evidence for a sizable cave accessible from the deepest known pit on the moon. It's located at the Sea of Tranquility, just 250 miles (400 kilometres) from Apollo 11's landing site.
Read more: Scientists have confirmed a cave on the moon that could be used to shelter future explorers and Underground cave found on moon could be ideal base for explorers
The Apollo missions left piles of trash on the Moon, but NASA is searching for sustainable solutions for waste management during future long-term lunar missions. An initiative called LunaRecycle, under the space agency's Centennial Challenges Program, aims to incentivize the design and development of recycling solutions for use on the surface of the Moon and/or inside pressurized lunar habitats.
Read more: NASA wants fresh ideas for recycling garbage on the moon
Scientists from RMIT University have led a world-first study on common food aromas that may help explain why astronauts report that meals taste bland in space and struggle to eat their normal nutritional intake.
Read more: Astronauts don’t eat enough because food tastes bland in space. We’re trying to work out why
Another application of fluid dynamics in space – creating a pot that astronauts can boil food in. Food scientist Larissa Zhou has spent the past four years working on a machine to boil food in microgravity. She named it H0TP0T, evoking the traditional Chinese custom of eating from a communal boiling pot (the zeros in the name refer to its intended home in microgravity).
Read more: Boiling Macaroni in Space? You’ll Need a Weirdly Shaped Pot
And Tripadvisor has listed its first review of space, written by Inspiration4 astronaut Dr Sian “Leo” Proctor.
I hate going to London, but this might be worth the trip. The Natural History Museum now shepherds new arrivals through a new ‘evolution garden’, a walk through several aeons of geological time. It has giddying cliffs, three-billion-year-old rocks, a prehistoric forest – and a giant bronze dinosaur called Fern.
Read more: ‘You travel five million years a metre’: inside the Natural History Museum’s mind-boggling new garden
Botanists at the International Botanical Congress in Madrid decided that more than 200 plants, fungi and algae species names should no longer contain a racial slur related to the word caffra, which is used against Black people and others mostly in southern Africa. Their proposal takes species names based on the word caffra and its derivatives and replaces them with derivatives of ‘afr’ to instead recognize Africa.
Read more: Hundreds of racist plant names will change after historic vote by botanists
Budding new plant biology research is paving the potential to produce food crops that not only survive but thrive in salty conditions. A research team led by the University of Newcastle's Dr Vanessa Melino has studied plants of the genus Salicornia to better understand its salt-resistant properties.
Read more: Plant research could pave the way for growing crops with seawater
Cryopreservation offers a robust solution for the long-term preservation of fungal cultures. By leveraging simple, scalable methods, even modestly resourced laboratories can establish effective cryogenic biobanks. That’s the conclusion of recent research from Paul Stamets' team at Fungi Perfecti LLC.
Read more: Cryopreservation: Unlocking the Secrets of Fungal Diversity
Haukongo is the senior cultivator at the research group MycoHab and her job is pretty unusual. She grows oyster mushrooms on chopped-down invasive weeds before the waste is turned into large, solid brown slabs – mycoblocks – that will be used, it’s hoped, to build Namibian homes.
Read more: ‘People think they’ll smell but they don’t’: building homes from mushroom waste and weeds
Britain has becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat – but only for pets. UK regulators approved Meatly’s pet product, cultivated chicken made from growing cells.
Read more: UK first European country to approve lab-grown meat, starting with pet food
Non-flowering plants are often regarded as unsophisticated compared to their flowering relatives. However, new research carried out by the John Innes Centre has found that non-flowering bryophytes, and mosses in particular, contain sophisticated immune receptor repertoires and may offer an exciting new research frontier in the global challenge of protecting crops from the threat of disease.
Read more: Not so simple: mosses and ferns offer new hope for crop protection
In 1922, Popular Science contributing writer E. L. Jones chronicled the ongoing efforts of early 20th century plant hunters to bring back promising species new to the US, such as the “Guatemalan avocado, a fruit more nourishing than bread or rice.” Since then, plant hunting has changed, but the hunt for undiscovered, undocumented, and endangered species continues. Today, plant hunters, chiefly botanists and horticulturists, tend to focus their efforts on safeguarding endangered species and finding new candidates for drugs.
Read more: How plant hunting has evolved over the centuries
Fairy lantern plants are seriously weird. They look like something from another planet with their lantern-like flowers, spend most of their lives underground, have no leaves or chlorophyll and suck all their nourishment out of fungi living in the ground. Despite their elusive lifestyle, a new species of Thismia has recently been discovered in two Malaysian rainforests. The small cup-shaped flowers of Thismia malayana were found sticking up out of leaf litter and rotten logs.
Read more: Plantwatch: new species of elusive fairy lantern found in Malaysia
The Guardian has more on last week’s story about Savor, the start-up that says it is putting cows out of a job by magicking butter out of thin air.
Read more: Butter made from CO2, not cows, tastes like ‘the real thing’, claims startup
What if the results of the next election were decided by plants, not people? That's an idea put forth by "experimental philosopher" and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats. He envisions a world in which plants have the same voting rights as humans. All living beings, he suggests, should have a role in our democracy.
Read more: An Election Season Thought Experiment: Imagine a Democracy Of the Plants, By the Plants, For the Plants
Broccolini is a cross between regular old broccoli and gai lan, or Chinese kale, and it is only 31 years old. It was born in a greenhouse at the Japanese seed company Sakata Inc., the creation of a broccoli breeder who was just having a bit of fun.
Read more: Broccolini: how ‘fun time’ between vegetables spawned a side-dish star
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Ex solo ad astra,
Emma (Space Gardener)