Space missions will increasingly become longer, so in the future, the crew members will need to grow their own food, and in order to achieve this, it is necessary to understand how plants respond to microgravity.
With this in mind, NASA's Veg-03 mission aims to check the functioning of a planting hardware called Yeggie, which manages the lighting and nutrient supply of a space garden.
This experiment is also testing the performance of the water distribution system with different procedures to those in place in 2015, when "Outredgeous" romaine lettuce was grown in the framework of the Veg-01 study.
In a statement, NASA announced that crew members on board the International Space Station (ISS) have managed to grow several vegetables, including mizuna, red Romaine lettuce and Tokyo Bekana cabbage. They are currently running two Veggie facilities simultaneously.
In the future, this plantation mechanism is expected to supply relevant information for the missions, while demonstrating that growing plants in space is possible and will become an integral part of future ISS missions.