海角大神

Astronauts tend to have impressive r茅sum茅s: They鈥檙e experts in science and engineering, they can fly jets, and they鈥檙e physically fit. And, now they might have to add another skill to this list: gardening.

NASA announced yesterday that it has started growing the colorful and quick-sprouting Zinnia flowers on the International Space Station as part of an experiment named 鈥淰eggie.鈥�

It will be and will help astronauts figure out how to grow other flowering plants, like tomatoes, which the agency says it hopes to grow in 2017. 聽

Experimenting with growing fresh food on the space station is one part of NASA鈥檚 mission to understand how living organisms behave in space so that it can try to keep astronauts healthy 鈥� and head out to study an asteroid and eventually Mars,鈥� the agency said.

鈥淚 think having this fresh food source available is going to be critical,鈥� Gioia Massa, a project scientist at NASA Kennedy Space Center and the brainchild behind Veggie, told 海角大神 in a phone interview.

Astronauts have a lot of food options 鈥� from shrimp cocktail to grilled chicken 鈥� but most are freeze-dried for long storage, requiring mixing them with water to make a meal. Fresh fruits and vegetables show up occasionally at the space station with supply deliveries, but they run out quickly, Dr. Massa explains.

"The farther and longer humans go away from Earth, the greater the need to be able to grow plants for food, ," Massa said in a NASA announcement.

With little variety of colors and life on the space station, flowers and other plants could also help boost astronauts鈥� spirits while they're working there, she says.

鈥淥ne benefit is just having this little piece of earth with you,鈥� Massa says, 鈥渟omething green and growing.鈥�

Astronauts started experimenting with Veggie last year when they grew red romaine lettuce in the same system that鈥檚 now growing the Zinnias: trays of water with bags seeds in a type of calcined clay used on baseball fields that increases aeration to help the plants grow. The growing plants are lit by LED lights and fertilized by an automatic release.

A as they harvested and ate the lettuce aboard the space station in August. Russian astronauts have been able to grow vegetables like mizuna and peas for some time, using techniques developed on the Mir space station that was in orbit from 1986 to 2001.

The Zinnias will grow for 60 days, twice as long as the lettuce did. To stimulate the plants to flower, says NASA, it will switch between keeping the LED lights on for 10 hours and then off for 14.

鈥� than growing a vegetative crop such as lettuce,鈥� said Massa in a NASA announcement. 鈥淟ighting and other environmental parameters are more critical.鈥�