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This July the space shuttle Discovery will take off from
Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to the
International Space Station. Onboard will be something
new: a space green house. The European Space
Agency's space green house will be directed and
overseen from a station in Trondheim, Norway. The
objective of the project is to study how plants behave in
space, and to study how the genes of plants are
influenced by life in space. The results of the research
may contribute to eventual missions to Mars.
"On earth plants orient themselves in relation to the
force of gravity. In space there is obviously neither
space nor sky, and so plants must orient themselves by
other criteria, like light" says professor Tor-Henning
Iversen.
Plants have been sent into space before, but only for
shorter periods onboard space shuttles. This time the
plants will be studied for three months. Researchers will
watch to see if the plants will grow, bloom and make
seeds. Water, light and temperatures will be controlled
from a command center at the Plant Bio Centre at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology in
Trondheim. The American astronauts, as well as a
Swede and a German who have been sent as spacegardeners,
will receive instructions from the research
team in Trondheim.
"If humans are going to travel to Mars, that's a three
year journey. Astronauts must have some nutrients they
can provide themselves, although it would require a
greenhouse that was much larger," says Iversen. NASA
is currently planning to send humans to the red planet
by 2025. From Dagbladet.no
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