USU Stars: USU Professors help develop technology to grow plants in space
Utah State University is known for strong engineering and science programs, and one of the latest exciting development to come out are the professors who have helped NASA develop the technology to grow plants in space. And the first decorative flower grown in space: a zinnia.
In the 1980s, USU wrote a proposal to NASA to work on this experiment. Bruce Bugbee, a professor in the plants, soils, and climates department was approached to collaborate on it.
“I had funding from NASA for a long time to grow plants in space. Even though I wasn’t directly involved in this, it wasn’t the first flower. It is the fifth plant, but the first decorative flower. It was a zinnia. Botanically, the first one was Utah wheat about ten years ago,” Bugbee said.
USU’s reputation for being an agriculture school is what drew NASA to the university.
The project took around thirty years to develop fully, and not without trials.
“There are two things you have to worry about when you grow things in space. the first is no gravity. The problem is when you water the plants, the water will just sit in the pot and the plants will get water-logged. Now we water with syringes and very calculated amounts,” Bugbee said. “The plants are in a closed box and you have to keep giving them carbon dioxide. They make their own gases to signal different things. One of them is called ethylene, which is toxic to plants if you don’t blow it away.”
Some of the zinnias got a disease because they were over-watered. Because of small glitches like this, many people were required to be on the team to make sure that, when something did go wrong, there were enough people to fix it and make suggestions to better design the unit, Bugbee said.
“I got to make comments on the design of the chamber and how to water the plants,” he said.
The amount of people working on the project made some of the tasks assigned seem minor, but having many people work on the project is what contributed to its success.
Gail Bingham, part of the Space Dynamics Laboratory, explained how the technology — called Lada — works.
“Three components of Lada are the control module, the vegetation module and the water reservoir,” Bingham said. “Special software allows control of the system and collects data for analysis in flight and on the ground. The vegetation module is where the plants grow. The seeds are planted in a soft cotton wick that extends from the root module. Astronauts plant the seeds in the wick after the system is set up in space. Sensors in the root module monitor the water and oxygen levels in the root zone, and the computer adds water to maintain a predetermined level using the pump… Since everything is computer controlled, little work is required of the astronaut.”
Scott Jones, another USU professor worked on projects that, while not exactly the same as Lada technology, did contribute to the experiment in the end.
“I was not involved directly in the LADA experiments. I was part of a space station experiment named Optimization of Root Zone Substrates, ORZS, which used some of the same hardware running LADA, but in this case there were no plants, only the root zone material,” Jones, also a professor in the plants, soil, and climate department, said. “We were testing the materials called Turface and Profile to determine if water and oxygen transport behaved the same in microgravity as it did on earth.”
There will be so many uses for this technology that could be a stepping stone into the future and one more tribute to the growing age of technology of the world today, Bugbee said.
“One of the big reasons we grow plants is to supply oxygen to the astronauts. They are for food and purified water as well. There is also a psychological value for the astronauts. They like to watch them grow,” he said.
— roniastephen@gmail.com
@RoniALake