When We All Move to Space, We’ll Have to Be Picky About Houseplants

Which plant would you take with you on a long trip to Mars? Great article from Atlas Obscura

An ideal candidate, first of all, would be a plant that isn’t too thirsty. Of the many factors that frustrate horticulture in microgravity, “The biggest problem we’ve had is water,” says Matt Romeyn, a biologist working on NASA’s vegetable production team at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Water doesn’t behave in microgravity the way it does on Earth, where gravity helps it move along to hydrate soil particles and root hairs before excess flows away. On the ISS, it both sticks everywhere and seeps out of containers built to hold it. In microgravity, water forms spheres, which can hang around as “big globs around roots, depriving them of oxygen,” says Chris Wolverton, a plant physiologist at Ohio Wesleyan University whose NASA-funded research focuses on the effects of gravity on plants. Water has slaughtered many green things trying to make a go of it in space. “If you don’t kill the plant by the water glomming onto it and forming a big, wet pocket,” Wolverton says, “you also provide this great environment for fungi, which are notorious for inhabiting space vehicles, and could infest the plant and kill it.”

So the less water to wrangle, the better, both because it must be administered so precisely and because it is such a precious resource to begin with. On the ISS, for instance, much of the water for the plants is repurposed from astronauts’ urine, sweat, and breath. “Then, as the plants give off water vapor through the process of transpiration through their leaves, that water is recondensed in the environment and put back through the system,” says Gioia Massa, a NASA scientist studying plants in microgravity. Thus, Wolverton recommends some kind of succulent, which wouldn’t have major water demands.

Learn more!


Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 38,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — New Products 11/06/24 Feat Adafruit Pixel Shifter – For Addressable LEDs

Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: New Pi Goodies, Pico Powered Fallout T-45 Helmet and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Halloween, WiLo, and more!

Maker Business – Adafruit Daily — First Solar’s $1.1 billion development of vertically integrated factory in the U.S.

Electronics – Adafruit Daily — Oscilloscope Jumble

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.