Space Gardening 101

You can’t escape eating (or gardening!) your vegetables, even if you’re in space. On Aug. 10, astronauts on the International Space Station sampled their first space grown salad. This freshly harvest red romaine lettuce was grown in the “Veggie” plant growth chamber that is designed to make gardens flourish in weightlessness.

In a weightless environment, there is no up and down, so roots grow in all directions. Water and soil, the materials used to anchor these plants and allow for root growth tend to float away.

How Do We Grow Plants in Space?

1. Plant Pillows

The Veggie chamber helps solve the problems of a weightless environment by using ‘plant pillows’, sounds comfy right? These pillows are bags filled with material for growing plants in space.

2. Wicks

Wicks are implanted into the bags and are used to draw water from inside the pillow to the plant.

These wicks also provide a place to glue the seeds. It’s important to orient the seeds so roots will grow ‘down’, and shoots that emerge will push out of the bag.

3. LED Lights

LED lights are used for photosynthesis and give the shoots a sense of direction so they keep growing upward. The walls of the Veggie chamber can expand to make room for the plant as it grows.

The purple/pinkish hue surrounding the plants in Veggie is the result of a combination of the red and blue lights, which is what the plants need to grow. Green LEDS were added so the plants look like edible food rather than weird purple plants.

Why are we growing plants in space?

When astronauts travel on deep space missions, like Mars, they will need to be self-sufficient for long periods of time. Having the ability to grow their own food is a big step in that direction. There is also a desire to grow flowering vegetables in space, which is why we are currently tending to zinnia flowers on orbit. Growing these flowering plants will help us understand longer duration growing plants that have to flower in space, such as tomatoes.

What’s Next? The next SpaceX delivery will include seeds for a small cabbage and additional red romaine lettuce. Upcoming experiments will use various ratios of red and blue lights and different fertilizers in attempts to improve crop yield, nutrition and flavor. The findings from these experiments can be utilized both on Earth and in space.

In addition to the nutrition benefits of growing vegetables in space, the psychological benefits are also significant. Having living plants can help with stress and increase the crews’ enjoyment. It provides the sights, smells and tastes of Earth.

To learn more about gardening in space, watch ScienceCast HERE.

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The Shakespearean Moons of Uranus

This weekend marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and we’re highlighting the moons of Uranus; some of which are named after characters from his works.

While most of the moons orbiting other planets take their names from Greek mythology, Uranus’ moons are unique in bing named for Shakespearean characters, along with a couple of them being named for characters from the works of Alexander Pope.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and improved ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered a total of 27 known moons around Uranus.

Here’s a sampling of some of the unique aspects of the moons:

Miranda

Shakespearean work: The Tempest

Miranda, the innermost and smallest of the five major satellites, has a surface unlike any other moon that’s been seen. It has a giant fault canyon as much as 12 times as deep as the Grand Canyon, terraced layers and surfaces that appear very old, and others that look much younger.

Ariel

Shakespearean work: The Tempest

Ariel has the brightest and possibly the youngest surface among all the moons of Uranus. It has a few large craters and many small ones, indicating that fairly recent low-impact collisions wiped out the large craters that would have been left by much earlier, bigger strikes. Intersecting valleys pitted with craters scars its surface.

Oberon

Shakespearean work: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Oberon, the outermost of the five major moons, is old, heavily cratered and shows little signs of internal activity. Unidentified dark material appears on the floors of many of its craters.

Cordelia and Ophelia

Shakespearean works: Cordelia - King Lear; Ophelia - Hamlet

Cordelia and Ophelia are shepherd moons that keep Uranus’ thin, outermost “epsilon” ring well defined.

Between them and miranda is a swarm of eight small satellites unlike any other system of planetary moons. This region is so crowded that astronomers don’t yet understand how the little moons have managed to avoid crashing into each other. They may be shepherds for the planet’s 10 narrow rings, and scientists think there must be still more moons, interior to any known, to confine the edges of the inner rings.

Want to learn more about all of Uranus’s moons? Visit: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/uranus/moons

Check out THIS blog from our Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan, where she reflects on the life and legacy of William Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death on April 23, 1616.

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Sarah Silverman

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'Let's lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all.'

Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden (via klytemnestre)

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What’s Up for November?

November weather can be challenging for backyard astronomers, but the moon is a reliable target, even when there are clouds.

Did you know that the moon takes about 29 days to go around the Earth once? It also takes the moon about 29 days to spin on its axis. This causes the same side of the moon to always face Earth.

On Nov. 3, the moon reaches last quarter when it rises at midnight and sets at noon. This is a great time to see the moon in the morning sky.

On Nov. 11, the new moon isn’t visible, because it’s between Earth and the sun, and the unlit side faces Earth. In the days after the new moon, the slender crescent gets bigger and brighter. Look just after sunset on Nov. 13 and 14 near the setting sun in the western sky.

The next phase on Nov. 19 is called the first quarter, because the moon has traveled one quarter of its 29-day orbit around Earth. The moon rises at noon and sets at midnight, so you can see it in the afternoon sky. It will rise higher in the sky after dark. That’s when you can look for the areas where four of the six Apollo missions landed on the moon! You won’t see the landers, flag or footprints, but it’s fun and easy to see these historic places with your own eyes or with binoculars.

To see the area: Look for three dark, smooth maria, or seas. The middle one is the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 11 landed very near a bright crater on the edge of this mare in 1969. The Apollo 15, 16 and 17 landing areas form the points of a triangle above and below the Apollo 11 site.

On Nov. 25, you can see the full moon phase, which occurs on the 14th day of the lunar cycle. The moon will rise at sunset and will be visible all night long, setting at sunrise.

On Thanksgiving (Nov. 26), the 15-day-old moon will rise an hour after sunset. You may even see some interesting features! And this is a great time to see the impact rays of some of the larger craters.