Crew Studies Space Agriculture, Biotechnology to Promote Future Missions

Tuesday’s International Space Station research objectives included learning how to grow crops on spacecraft and produce vitamins and nutrients in space to sustain crews farther away from Earth. The Expedition 72 crewmates also explored how the human body orients itself in weightlessness and serviced a pair of docked spacecraft.

NASA Flight Engineers Butch Wilmore and Nick Hague joined each other on Tuesday setting up hardware for the Plant Habitat-07 botany experiment inside the Kibo laboratory module. Wilmore installed the science carrier that is packed with red romaine lettuce seeds in Kibo’s Advanced Plant Habitat then collected water samples for analysis. Hague prepared water refill bags and injected water into the plant habitat to begin growing a small crop of lettuce. The space agriculture investigation is exploring optimal plant growth methods in space, the nutritional content of space-grown plants, and the types of microbes they support.

NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit studied how space radiation exposure affects plant growth at the molecular and cellular levels. He processed samples and watered thale cress plants that had been growing for two weeks in Kibo’s Cell Biology Experiment Facility. The samples were then placed inside a science freezer for future analysis. The Plant UV-B study is observing how microgravity stress and high ultraviolet radiation affects plants to promote growing space crops

Commander Suni Williams continued her investigation into using genetically engineered yeast to produce on-demand nutrients and avoid vitamin deficiencies on long-term missions. She first hydrated production packs containing the yeast and edible media for incubation to activate yeast growth. Williams then photographed and agitated the packs before stowing them inside a research incubator. The samples are later frozen then returned to Earth to analyze their ability promote crew health and improve the preservation of probiotics.

In the orbital outpost’s Roscosmos segment, Flight Engineers Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner took turns wearing a virtual reality headset while attached to electrodes. The two cosmonauts were studying how a crew member’s vision, balance, and spatial orientation adjusts to microgravity. Ovchinin then replaced life support gear inside the Soyuz MS-26 crew ship before gathering items for disposal inside the Progress 89 cargo craft. Vagner pointed a camera outside the Zvezda service module and photographed components on the Nauka science module for routine inspection.

Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov turned off and stowed a student-controlled camera that photographed pre-programmed Earth landmarks. He then searched areas inside the station’s Roscosmos segment for extra cargo stowage space then worked on Nauka’s ventilation system.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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