Gardeners of the Galaxy Mission Report: 11 March 2025
Your weekly round-up of astrobotany news and adventure. This week we've got algae that could survive on Mars, astrobotany in the SAM analog and AI-generated images causing problems for gardeners.
Hello, Gardeners of the Galaxy! Welcome to this week's Mission Report.
So it has been one of those weeks that demonstrates that space travel is still hard. SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for the Mars rocket program. Debris scattered over parts of the Caribbean, and air travel over parts of America was disrupted until the skies cleared.
And although Firefly Aerospace’s Moon mission stuck its landing, the same could not be said for Intuitive Machines. Their second attempt at a lunar landing ended early as the lander ended up sideways. Phy.org has a round-up of the Moon landing hits and misses to date.
In better news, the X-37B space plane, carrying a NASA seed experiment, landed safely at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California after 434 days in space. And ESA successfully launched Ariane 6 for the second time.
And NASA is targeting 7:48 pm EDT (23:48 GMT) on 12 March for the launch of Crew-10 to the International Space Station (ISS ).
In other news...
US Space Force Sgt. William Wallace, 4th Space Operations Squadron payload engineer, has participated in two astrobotany studies at SAM, the Space Analog for the Moon and Mars habitat at Biosphere 2. He served as the lead researcher on NASA-funded projects exploring the potential for using spirulina algae to support spaceflight.
Read more: USSF Guardian advances space agriculture research in NASA study
A PhD student at the Universitat de València has shown that algae extracted from lichen can survive exposure to Mars conditions. The next stage of the research will investigate whether it is possible to use synthetic biology techniques to create new strains of these lichen microalgae that can produce a variety of useful substances. I have re-published the ESA press release on my Space Botany website, because… well… I wrote it for ESA 😊
Read more: Growing Algae on Mars
In the quest for sustainable long-duration space missions, researchers are turning to an unlikely hero: mushrooms. Specifically, the sporeless oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus), a versatile fungus known for its ability to thrive on waste materials, is being explored as a potential food source aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Read more: Cultivating Oyster Mushrooms in Space: A Sustainable Solution for Long-Duration Missions
Wageningen University & Research invitesd students from all over the world to submit ground-breaking business ideas for improving the sustainability and resource efficiency of current food production. After an intense first phase with 44 teams, 20 teams are moving forward in the ReThink Food Challenge. These teams stood out for their innovative, impactful, and creative solutions that push the boundaries of food production in space and on Earth. Their ideas not only address the constraints of farming in extreme environments but also provide promising solutions for tackling global food security and sustainability challenges.
Read more: The 20 Boldest Ideas for Growing Food in Space—and on Earth
Opportunities
Orius is working with CNES to develop cultivation systems to power future space bases. One of the challenges in developing these systems is understanding the impact of gravity on living organisms. Their engineers are designing an advanced Random Positioning Machine (A-RPM) dedicated to partial gravity simulation to study plant growth under space-like conditions. They’re now looking for a PhD candidate (I think, it’s in French!) to join the team.
Learn more: 25-078 Algorithmes de contrôle pour un "Random Positioning Machine" avancé
NASA is seeking design ideas from global creators for a zero gravity indicator that will fly aboard the agency’s Artemis II test flight. Zero gravity indicators are small, plush items carried aboard spacecraft to provide a visual indication of when the spacecraft and its crew reach space. This opportunity, with a submission deadline of May 27, asks for original designs representing the significance of NASA’s Artemis campaign, the mission, or exploration and discovery, and meet specific requirements for materials and size.
Learn more:NASA Invites Creators to Design Mascot for Artemis Moon Mission
John McFall is also part of the ART programme, and you can read more about the programme, and see photos with John included, in ESA’s latest article.
Read more: The ART of training – part two
Ross Brockwell spent a year enclosed in NASA’s first CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) mission, a simulated journey to Mars. “The experience with our hydroponic garden was particularly interesting. It was fascinating to learn about and to think about the technical challenges of growing fresh food in Martian circumstances.”
Read more: What I Learned About Earth After a Year on “Mars”
The FFG project Estimation, at the Institute of Geodesy at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), is researching ways to use signals from satellite mega-constellations for Earth observation.
Read more: Utilizing communication satellites to survey Earth
If organisms once dwelled in the bygone Martian oceans, they might have left behind tiny fossils in certain minerals. Now, researchers have found a technique to identify evidence of such microfossils on Earth - and they say the same technology could be used on future missions to Mars.
Lego is working with Lunar Outpost, a space robotics and mobility firm headquartered in Colorado. No further information was shared, and Lego advised its fans to "keep an eye out for a future product and more than a few surprises along the way."
Read more: Lego partners with Lunar Outpost for 'future product and surprises'
Meat, dairy and sugar grown in a lab could be on sale in the UK for human consumption for the first time within two years, sooner than expected. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is looking at how it can speed up the approval process for lab-grown foods.
Read more: Lab-grown food could be sold in UK within two years
Based on the photographs returned by the last three Rangers, scientists felt confident to move on to the next phase of robotic lunar exploration, the Surveyor series of soft landers. The Ranger photographs provided confidence that the lunar surface could support a soft-landing and that the Sea of Tranquillity presented a good site for the first human landing. A little more than four years after the final Ranger images, Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon.
Read more: 60 years ago: Ranger 8 moon photos aid in Apollo site selection
As the fourth largest museum of fungi in North America, the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium (CUP) hosts more than 400,000 fungal specimens as well as several ongoing research projects in mycology, the study of fungi. As part of the lichen project, Bob Dirig is currently working on creating a list of all of the approximately one hundred lichens located in the pine barrens of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve.
Read more: The Scientists Behind Cornell’s Mushroom Museum
A team of scientists from University College Cork (UCC) , the University of Connecticut, and the Natural History Museum of Vienna have uncovered how plants responded to catastrophic climate changes 250 million years ago. Their findings reveal the long, drawn-out process of ecosystem recovery following one of the most extreme periods of warming in Earth’s history: the ‘End-Permian Event’.
Read more: Plants Struggled For Millions Of Years After The World’s Worst Climate Catastrophe
Scrambled egg lichen, so named for its bright yellow, crumbly appearance, was once common in the Breckland region of Norfolk and Suffolk but was last seen there in 1994. Now the rare lichen has been reintroduced to its historical habitat of East Anglia – with the help of some bookbinding glue.
Read more: Rare lichen brought back to East Anglia with help of bookbinding glue
In the summer sun, duckweed (Wolffia globosa) can be a menace. It grows so fast it covers a pond in a few days, blocking out the light for the life below. But it is this ability to multiply and its high nutritional value that has made it a potentially valuable food. Although commonly eaten in Asia, where varieties of duckweed are also known as water lentils or watermeal, it has taken nearly 10 years for scientists to convince the European Food Safety Authority that it is a vegetable that is safe to eat.
Read more: Fast-growing duckweed can go from garden menace to nutritional dish
AI technology has made it possible to generate photos that are almost indistinguishable from real photos. This is causing problems for gardeners and plant suppliers.
Read more: AI’s fake plant images are bilking gardeners
Watch It!
I'll be back in your inboxes next week. Thanks for reading and being part of the Gardeners of the Galaxy community.
Ex solo ad astra,
Emma (Space Gardener)