Gardeners of the Galaxy Mission Report: 16 April 2024
Your weekly round-up of astrobotany news and adventure. This week we've got seeds enduring the space environment, Asian greens on the ISS, fungal mycelia launched into the stratosphere, and more!
Hello, Gardeners of the Galaxy! Welcome to this week's Mission Report.
Shipshape Urban Farms is an Alabama-based AgTech startup creating localised food networks with modular hydroponic farms. They partnered with Above: Orbital to launch nearly 15,000 lettuce and tomato seeds on SpaceX CRS-30. Those seeds will hang outside the International Space Station (ISS) as part of (MISSE-19-Commercial).
The company hopes that exposure to the space environment will encourage mutagenesis, enabling the development of new varieties. They say this is just the "first in a string of launches" that Shipshape has on its roadmap.
Shipshape CEO Dale Speetjens says his big goal is to "one day in the future grow crops up in space and then essentially drop them down to Earth and into disaster areas."
Read more: This Alabama Startup Is Literally Flying On The International Space Station Right Now.
Shipshape has also announced Project Demeter, using a constellation of satellites strategically positioned at Lagrange points to "unearth unique plant cultivars, process grey water, manage carbon dioxide, and produce essential resources like food, medicine, and ethanol-based fuels."
The project's first phase involves the deployment of a 6U CubeSat "focused on studying plant species to discover unique cultivars capable of thriving in space's demanding conditions". In phase two, they'll equip a 50kg satellite "to convert significant carbon dioxide reserves into essential resources such as water, food, alcohols, and pharmaceutical compounds".
While I was digging around for more on the Shipshape story, I came across Space Seeds for Sustainable Indoor Farming in NASA's Space Station Research Explorer. Scheduled for Expedition 70 (which ended on 25th March), it's a project from the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) exploring whether space mutagenesis can help develop new varieties of Asian greens for indoor farming. Seeds of five common crops (Choy Sum, Gai Lan, Bok Choy, amaranth, and tomato) were to be exposed to cosmic radiation and microgravity in low earth orbit, and subsequently screened for phenotypic traits desirable for indoor farming.
(Singapore also sent coriander seeds to the ISS in 2021, which they reported got "upsized" in outer space.)
That's all I've got so far, but it looks like researchers at the GIS and SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Biodiversity Medicine (BD-MED) have been experimenting with growing plants in regular soil against Mars simulant soil. Their work was recently part of the “Mars: The Red Mirror" exhibition at Singapore's ArtScience Museum.
Read more: Can Terrestrial Crops Grow on Mars? (Scroll down to the 2023 section).
In other news...
Researchers at the University of Cagliari, Sassari, and the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia, Italy, investigated whether the nutrients and minerals in astronaut pee and Martian regolith can be used to grow cyanobacteria to supply food and oxygen to astronauts during long-term crewed missions on Mars.
Read more: Could microbes feed astronauts on Mars?
Prof Matthew Gilliham from P4S joined the South Australian Country Hour to talk about the project to develop autonomous veg-growing systems for the upcoming Axiom space station. The first stages of the project will produce a modular prototype to grow the red romaine lettuce that already has a proven track record in space.
Listen here: South Australian Country Hour (from 43:50).
Garden City Fungi, in partnership with Florida Atlantic University, launched fungal mycelia into the stratosphere to study their CO2 output, plant viability, and reaction to space radiation.
Read more: Pioneering space agriculture: Montana company uses mushrooms in space farming.
CANGrow™ won the Canadian arm of the Deep Space Food Challenge. The system produce over 700 kilograms of food a year, including dwarf tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce, and mycoprotein.
Horacio Acerbo y Martín Blasco se unieron para lograr que Mycofood, como llamaron al alimento que producen a partir de un hongo, sirva para acabar con la desnutrición en el mundo en los próximos años. También compiten en la Nasa para que su biomasa viaje en las misiones espaciales a Marte.
Leer más: Dos argentinos inventaron comida espacial con inteligencia artificial a partir de un hongo.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Discovery Programme is funding Mycorena's "Resource Efficient Food Production System for Space Travel" focusing on mycoprotein from filamentous fungi. A collaboration with AlgoSolis will explore using microalgae as a substrate for fungi growth.
Read more: Mycorena Awarded ESA Funding for Revolutionary Mycoprotein Production.
Two South Dakota teachers have been selected to participate in a NASA Liftoff Summer Institute program. This year's program will focus on growing plants in space and the relationship between plants and space explorers.
Read more: How do you grow plants in space? Lower Brule, Chester teachers selected for NASA Liftoff Summer Institute.
This autumn, a team of students from Ohio University will be sending an experiment to the ISS with the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) Mission 18. Their experiment, 'Effect of Spaceflight-Adapted Bacteria on Plant Growth and Resilience in Microgravity' explores how the presence of novel strains of Sphingomonas sanguini found on the ISS affect the growth of Arabidopsis thaliana.
Read more: From Athens to the ISS.
Scientists from Samara Korolev University have created a satellite climate control system, Sigma-2, for the Bion-M No.2 orbital laboratory due to launch later this year. However, not all the experiments onboard will be getting the 5* accommodation.
Seeds of rare plants from the Botanical Garden of Samara University will be located on the ouside of the spacecraft, exposed to space radiation and temperature fluctuations.
Читать далее: «Климат-контроль» для орбитальной лаборатории «Бион-М» №2 создали в Самаре.
For the moment, Earth is the only habitable planet in our solar system, and Gardeners of the Galaxy is proudly powered by renewable energy via Ecotricity. If you're in the UK and you make the switch to Ecotricity using my code (RAF-6DRP5) before 31 May 2024, you can get up to £50 in credit on your account (£25 per fuel).
A joint project between the European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency, and the Council for Agricultural Research and Analysis of Agricultural Economics, embarked on a mission to study the effects of the space environment on extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) in the spring of 2022.
Read more: This Ancient Food Could Help Keep Astronauts Alive On Long Haul Space Missions.
The LASSIE (Legged Autonomous Surface Science in Analog Environments) Project involves a multidisciplinary team training a robot dog to walk on the Moon.
Watch now: Engineers in Oregon train dog robot to walk on Moon.
A Carleton University research team is testing how the insects respond to microgravity to see if they can be nutritious space food. Team Insecta will send crickets at different life stages on a parabolic flight this summer, checking whether the crickets survive and if their age affects their likelihood of making it back alive.
Read more: Can crickets become space food? These Carleton researchers want to find out.
From its "absurd" core to the baffling chemical composition of its surface, Mercury is full of surprises – not least the planet's origins. But some answers could be held in rocks found in Cyprus.
Read more: Mercury: The Solar System's smallest planet may once have been as large as Earth.
An Australian startup is working to accelerate crop growth using electroculture. Rainstick mimics lightning in controlled environments, creating ions and pushing them onto plants and fungi to stimulate growth. if it works, it would boost food production and eliminate the need for pesticides.
Read more: This Australian startup wants to help crops grow by zapping them with electricity.
In Taylor Yard, a former railyard near downtown Los Angeles, volunteers knelt down to tend to scrubby plants growing in neat rows under the sweltering sun. But they're not ordinary gardeners - they're part of a study investigating how native California plants and fungi could be used to clean up contaminated brownfields.
Read more: 'Solar powered vacuum cleaners': the native plants that could clean toxic soil.
Opportunites
Magnitude.io is starting its STEM lecture series on 23 April 2024. Churchill Fellow, Ben Newsome, founder of Fizzics Education will be talking on “How Science drives Literacy & Numeracy through Engagement”. Later topics in the series include "Lunar Geology" and "Astrobotany – How Plants in Space connect the World".
Sign up here: Magnitude 2024 Lecture Series.
The World's Biggest Analog mission - involving multiple habitats and collaborative research - is looking for crew for 2025.
Find out more: World's Biggest Analog.
Space Lab Technologies, LLC needs engineers to work on the LEAF project to send plants to the Moon.
Learn more: Careers.
Purdue University is recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher for LEAF.
And the University of Florida needs an Administrative Assistant for the Space Institute.
Learn more: Administrative Assistant III.
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Ex solo ad astra,
Emma (Space Gardener)