The crew aboard the International Space Station have grown two batches of mixed greens: mizuna, red cos (or romaine) lettuce and tokyo bekana cabbage, and they are now running two veggie facilities simultaneously.
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.
Originally published by Cosmos as Space salad
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