Originally published July 31 2005
Tending plants in space could decrease astronaut stress levels
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Gail Bingham, the chief scientist at the Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University in North Logan, has been studying vegetation growth in space for years. In a 6-month-long simulated space flight, astronauts tending to plants like peas, mizuna (a Russian leafy vegetable), wheat, peppers and rice were able to repeatedly harvest with no detrimental effects.
Gail Bingham remembers vividly the day in 1996 when a team at the Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow lost 100 of his crew members in the institute's international space station simulation chamber.
This loss was felt by few, but to the three-member team participating in the six-month ground isolation study, those 100 stalks of wheat were part of the crew.
In the ground simulation, the Russian crew tended to the plants on the side when not performing their regular duties during the half-year they spent in a simulated space station flight.
While the plants have provided crews at Russia's Mir space station and at the international space station a periodic break from their freeze-dried food packs, the task of attending to the growth chambers results in a much more important psychological benefit that may prove vital in long-term manned spaceflight, such as that observed in the 1996 simulation.
In September 2002 the resulting growth chamber called Lada (named for the Russian goddess of spring) was launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to the international space station.
The Lada system, composed of two growth chambers, a control module and two water reservoirs, allows for the growth of plants without gravity, which on Earth pushes water into the soil and also opens up air pockets to allow oxygen to reach the roots.
"The longer you go, the longer the mission, the more important this is," said Charlie Barnes, head of the Biomass Production Program at NASA.
Barnes' division provides Bingham with several hundred-thousand dollars a year in funding, but he said NASA support for this type of research has been limited as NASA Administrator Mike Griffin directs funds to develop a new crew exploration vehicle by 2010.
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