How is the Italian space garden going one month after launch

Exactly one month has passed since launch of the first Vega-C carrier rocket from the European base of Kourou, in French Guiana. Among the various holds present in this colossus, almost 35 meters high and which came off the ground on July 13, there is one dedicated to the platform GreenCube. This structure, of modest dimensions and just 30 x 10 x 10 centimeters, is used to test the botanical responses in the cultivation of plants and vegetables in apparently hostile environmental conditions, as well as of microgravity. This is the first ever experiment of this kind and will provide key insights into the production of fresh and nutritious food for astronauts.

An all-Italian project

GreenCube is a space mini-vegetable garden in orbit 6 thousand kilometers from the Earth, conceived by the La Sapienza University of Rome and which houses crops and plants capable of withstanding sub-optimal environmental conditions. A few days after the start of the experiment, the first results are already arriving, providing new information useful for the development of the research.

The project, coordinated by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and supported by Enea (the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) and Federico II University of Naples, has the more general purpose of analyzing the cultivation of micro-vegetables in space and on other celestial bodies. For this reason, a pressurized chamber has been created equipped with high-tech sensors that constantly monitor environmental parameters such as the intensity of the lightthe temperature and the distribution of the nutrient solution.

Ground handling and reproducibility tests

Once the module has been placed in orbit, all the analysis systems inside the chamber have been checked and environmental conditions have been set that are compatible with the development of the plants. The experimentation of hydroponic culture, soilless, comes managed directly from the Earth and will be used to verify the ability of selected micro-vegetables to grow and develop despite the difficult conditions. For the first experiment it was an aromatic plant, the watercress. It will be very important to evaluate at the same time theefficiency in terms of consumption of energy, air, water and resources, to have a complete feasibility assessment. Even the cosmic radiation they are a question on which it is necessary to investigate and only at the end of the experimentation (perhaps already in a few days, given that the life cycles are 15-20 days) it will be possible to obtain scientifically solid information.

For now, everything seems to be proceeding according to plan: the launch went well and the satellite has begun to orbit our planet. Even during the passage inside the Van Allen bands, the areas with the highest level of radiation that surround the Earth, the system and the crops have shown excellent resistance to external conditions. This first experiment will then be replicated identically on Earth, so as to be able to have an immediate and real-time comparison of any differences that may arise. Once this first experimental cycle is over, there will be a series of replicas always on the ground to refine the monitoring systems and the environmental conditions to which the plants will be subjected when moving on to the implementation of these systems on a larger scale.