The Advanced Plant Habitat on the International Space Station celebrates the Fourth of July with its LED lights, displaying an American flag pattern. Roughly the size of a mini-fridge, the habitat is designed to test which growth conditions plants prefer in space and provides specimens a larger root and shoot area. This space in turn will allow a wider variety of crops to grow aboard the station.
The habitat is equipped with a monitoring system, the Plant Habitat Avionics Real-Time Manager, or PHARMER, that provides real-time telemetry, remote commanding and photo downlink to the team at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The system records data from its 180 sensors, including water usage, carbon dioxide levels, light levels, temperature, humidity and oxygen in the growth chamber, and temperature, humidity and oxygen levels in the plant root systems, and sends it back to Kennedy for analysis. #4thofJuly2018
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The Earth's limb and the Pacific Ocean contrast segments of the International Space Station's Kibo laboratory module built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in this June 23, 2018 image. At right is a portion of the Experiment Logistics Module, Pressurized Section (ELM-PS) which is the Kibo lab's storage facility. Next to the ELM-PS is Kibo's 10-meter-long robotic arm, or Remote Manipulator System, which is attached to the lab module's core component, the Pressurized Module.
Kibo was launched in segments to the station on two space shuttle missions in March and May of 2008 and a third shuttle mission in July 2009.
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Crew aboard the International Space Station are now running two Veggie facilities simultaneously!
They have grown two batches of mixed greens, including mizuna, red romaine lettuce and tokyo bekana cabbage.
Organisms grow differently in space, from single-celled bacteria to plants and humans. But future long-duration space missions will require crew members to grow their own food, so understanding how plants respond to microgravity is an important step toward that goal. The Veg-03 experiment uses the Veggie plant growth facility to cultivate a type of cabbage, lettuce and mizuna which are harvested on-orbit with samples returned to Earth for testing.
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Watching a bubble float effortlessly through the International Space Station may be mesmerizing and beautiful to witness, but that same bubble is also teaching researchers about how fluids behave differently in microgravity than they do on Earth. The near-weightless conditions aboard the station allow researchers to observe and control a wide variety of fluids in ways that are not possible on Earth, primarily due to surface tension dynamics and the lack of buoyancy and sedimentation within fluids in the low-gravity environment. Understanding how fluids react in these conditions could lead to improved designs on fuel tanks, water systems and other fluid-based systems for space travel, as well as back on Earth.
Here, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg watches a water bubble float freely between her and the camera, showing her image refracted in the droplet.
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The Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 53 Commander Randy Bresnik of NASA and Flight Engineers Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2017.
Bresnik, Nespoli and Ryazanskiy returned to Earth after 138 days in space, where they served as members of the Expedition 52 and 53 crews onboard the International Space Station. Their Soyuz landed safely at 3:37 a.m. EST (2:37 p.m. Kazakhstan time).
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