This morning Beijing time (at 2:10 a.m. local time), three taikonauts landed in the northern province of Inner Mongolia and managed to leave an impressive legacy to their successors on the new Chinese space station: space-grown lettuce. We used ChatGPT to talk about the otherworldly agricultural experiment.
The three taikonauts of the Shenzhou 16 crew—mission commander Jing Haifeng and his subordinates Zhu Yangzhou and Gui Haichao—who have been aboard the Tiangong space station since May, have begun two experiments to grow vegetables. In June, they began growing lettuce, which had already yielded four clusters of lettuce leaves, and in August they began growing cherry tomatoes and green onions.
The Space Garden Project, designed to pave the way for future space mission crews who could remain extraterrestrial for a long time, uses special equipment designed to cultivate crops in space's microgravity environment. Along with the vegetables grown by the taikonauts on the new space station, launched in 2021, their colleagues on the ground in China grew replicas of the same plants, in order to closely compare the results of growing plants in space with those on our planet. Such an approach provides important insights into the unique challenges and conditions of cultivating plants in space to improve humanity's ability to meet its food needs in space in the distant future.
Yang Renza, a researcher from the Taikonauts Research and Training Center in China, emphasized the significance of the project: "This vegetable growing mechanism is a key part of the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), and is used in space to validate the relevant technologies. In the future, we will focus on rapid large-scale growth."
The ECLSS is essential for long-term life in space. The plants grown through this mechanism absorb carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis, producing oxygen in the process. In addition, they play a role in replenishing and purifying water through transpiration. China is trying to prove the system's viability before landing a man on the moon for the first time in 2030, and starting to build a permanent base on our celestial companion, and possibly another base on Mars, over the next decade.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us