NASA’s appetite for space vegetation.

NASA has always made mankind proud by it’s experiments and their results that helped mankind to know about the Outer space that every human would dream of going to . In their efforts to make vegetation possible in Outer space NASA has brought up a new technique to serve their needs which may actually make harvesting fresh vegetables in Outer space easier. As we have lot of gardening kits on the market, an exceptionally green thumb isn’t necessary to grow tasty fresh vegetables by your self here on Earth. Keeping this ease of farming in mind U.S. astronauts thought of living and working aboard the International Space Station and grow their own food under  controlled circumstances , for this purpose after intense research NASA developed a vegetable production system to farm fresh vegetables in space.

This Vegetable Production System, called VEGGIE for short is set to launch aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule on NASA’s third Commercial Resupply Services mission next year.   Veggie is a low-cost plant growth chamber that uses a flat-panel light bank that includes red, blue and green LEDs for plant growth and crew observation. Veggie’s unique design is collapsible for transport and storage and expandable up to a foot and a half as plants grow inside it.An added benefit of the VEGGIE system is that it requires only about 115 watts to operate.

Because Space on the Space station is limited, some adjustments  were made to the growth chamber to accommodate space requirements. At Kennedy’s Space Life Sciences Laboratory, a crop of lettuce and radishes was grown in the prototype test unit. Seedlings were placed in the Veggie root-mat pillows, and their growth was monitored for health, size, amount of water used, and the microorganisms that grew on them . If the energy it takes to power a desktop computer and monitor. The blue, red and green light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are bright enough for crops to grow, but energy efficient enough for a place where power is at a premium.