Bean Me Up: Scientists To Grow Crops In Space

Provided by Sky News

The 10-year programme being led by researchers in Norway will see foods such as cherry tomatoes, lettuce and soybeans grown on the International Space Station (ISS).

Called Time Scale, the project is being run alongside the EU and the European Space Agency (ESA) to investigate how food plants grow in space and how the plants can help supply space travellers with food and air in the future.

Ann-Iren Kittang Jost, research manager at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space (CIRIS) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, is leading the project.

"I do envision that what we can form the basis for food cultivation on the Moon and Mars sometime in the future," she told Science Nordic.

"These are just a few preliminary steps. I don't want to venture a guess regarding how long it will take before they can be used on a large scale.

"We haven't decided which food plant to cultivate yet. We've discussed cherry tomatoes, lettuce or soybeans."

Astronauts need around 30kg of water, food and air each day and despite some recycling of water on the ISS, supplies must be delivered from earth at huge cost.

Plant experiments on the ISS have been run from the CIRIS control room in Trondheim since 2006, mostly on the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana - the first to have its genome sequenced.

But Ms Kittang Jost said the cultivation of more complex organisms in space conditions required far more research.

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Bean Me Up: Scientists To Grow Crops In Space