[HN Gopher] First tomato ever grown in space, lost 8 months ago,...
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First tomato ever grown in space, lost 8 months ago, found by NASA
astronauts
Author : koolba
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-12-10 10:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbsnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbsnews.com)
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| If the camera pans to George Clooney making a pizza, run.
| otikik wrote:
| Love is the strongest force in the Universe anyway.
| rodent_rodeo wrote:
| No joy in this article, zero mention of state of tomato when it
| was found.
|
| Also, they blamed a guy for a while for having eaten the tomato,
| his name is now cleared. I was blaming him too thinking that ISS
| food was dehydrated or space paste. However, looks like they get
| some decent stuff like taco kits and pizzas at least time to
| time: https://www.nasa.gov/history/space-station-20th-food-on-
| iss/
| resolutebat wrote:
| It's been sitting for eight months at room temperature in a
| plastic bag, I think we can pretty safely assume it was in bad
| shape.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| No, we can't.
|
| We have some idea how it would look on earth. Pretty bad, if
| recognizable at all.
|
| But I have no clue how deterioration and rot happen in space.
| Do the microbes that help break it down exist? Do fruit flies
| hitch rides to space? How does gravity affect decomposition?
| Do the conditions of being in orbit have any sort of
| preservation effect?
|
| Yeah. I'd imagine it wasn't fresh, but it just isn't a given.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Oxidation resulting in Lycopene degradation and
| isomerization.
|
| It probably is a shrivelled up dehydrated tomato.
|
| But most probably edible. Wouldn't get much pleasure out of
| eating it though. Don't see bags of dehydrated tomatoes on
| the shop-shelf.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| It might sun-dry pretty well without a pesky atmosphere
| in the way
| em-bee wrote:
| i don't know if sun dried tomatoes are top shelf
| articles, but they are sold as delicacies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-dried_tomato
| tomatotomato31 wrote:
| In Germany you can get them nearly everywhere.
|
| I'm surprised so many find it weird
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _Don 't see bags of dehydrated tomatoes on the shop-
| shelf_
|
| I do. I have a bag in the cabinet. I use it most often on
| pizzas and pasta. Dehydrated tomatoes are delicious and
| are generally labeled "sun dried" even when there is no
| sun involved in the drying. Plus, I can order tomato
| powder and use it for things. Admittedly, I don't care
| for eating the dried tomatoes plain as it concentrates
| the flavor more (or differently?) than tomato paste does.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sun dried tomatoes seem to work well in pizza dough too.
|
| As in throw in a few chunks while making the base, and
| the flavour seems to transfer well without screwing
| things up. :)
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Well, you only need those bacteria to make it rot and I can
| guarantee you that there are billions (or more likely large
| numbers of trillions) of various bacteria there, I would
| expect tens of thousands various subtypes (sorry for
| incorrect naming, just an average Joe).
|
| Just because they are now in low gravity doesn't mean they
| will stop eating whatever they can. And without much
| gravity to hold them down I would expect they can actually
| spread more easily (imagine one cough or sneeze where
| droplets just go in straight line till hitting something).
|
| On their skin, behind their nails, in their mouth, in their
| bowels and so on. Plus on and in everything else. No way
| getting rid of those
| jacquesm wrote:
| Isn't the ISS a high rate of mutation environment for
| such creatures as well due to the radiation?
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Do the conditions of being in orbit have any sort of
| preservation effect?
|
| There's no reason to suspect they would. Even so, it is
| unlikely we could ever take advantage of this in any
| meaningful or efficient way.
|
| > Do the microbes that help break it down exist?
|
| Almost certainly. They're in excrement and the astronauts
| are allowed to bring some personal effects on board.
| Speaking of excrement, on Apollo, they didn't have an
| advanced toilet, so they just used bags. Apparently, they
| were instructed to seal the bag after adding an
| antibacterial agent, for fear of them eventually inflating
| from decomposition products and then popping.
|
| Also.. quick search shows that ISS astronauts after 6
| months to a year have _more_ bacteria on their skin and
| _might_ be why astronauts experience higher levels of
| inflammation in general.
|
| Finally, let me drop my favorite ISS fact here, if you're
| doing work outside the ISS that requires turning a wrench,
| you must turn it _very_ slowly, less than 1 full turn per
| minute, because the low gravity environment means the ISS
| as a whole weighs next to nothing and vibrational modes
| from wrenching can setup very easily. This fact is
| specifically flagged in several spacewalk manuals.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Finally, let me drop my favorite ISS fact here, if
| you're doing work outside the ISS that requires turning a
| wrench, you must turn it _very_ slowly, less than 1 full
| turn per minute, because the low gravity environment
| means the ISS as a whole weighs next to nothing and
| vibrational modes from wrenching can setup very easily.
| This fact is specifically flagged in several spacewalk
| manuals
|
| Can you point me to a resource where I can read more
| about this? The closest thing I could find was an article
| from 1998 that stresses the importance of being tethered
| while wrenching so that you rotate the bolt, rather than
| the bolt rotating you:
| https://www.csmonitor.com/1998/1204/120498.us.us.3.html
|
| edit: I still can't find anything explaining this, but I
| did find https://msis.jsc.nasa.gov/sections/section14.htm
| and https://www.nasa.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2009/07/143159main_s... which suggest
| bolt-driving power tools are used during spacewalks
| (which presumably get more than 1 RPM)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Wouldn't those vibrational modes be damped by the _mass_
| rather than the weight of the ISS? Because the same goes
| for any other interaction between the ISS and its
| occupants, torquing down a bolt is no different from
| anything else. The biggest worry would be to upset the
| orientation of the entire ISS but I 'm assuming that you
| are going to be tethered and/or connected to the ISS, if
| you didn't it would be _you_ that spins rather than the
| ISS due to the difference in relative mass.
| koolba wrote:
| > There's no reason to suspect they would. Even so, it is
| unlikely we could ever take advantage of this in any
| meaningful or efficient way.
|
| What about the higher levels of radiation impacting mold
| growth?
| m463 wrote:
| For all we know, there could be effects from radiation
| passing by:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
| voytec wrote:
| > It's been sitting for eight months at room temperature in a
| plastic bag, I think we can pretty safely assume it was in
| bad shape.
|
| At some point there were no bacteria which could decompose
| big fallen trees. More and more fallen trees increased
| pressure on the ones beneath and some time later we've got
| coal and diamonds.
|
| Tomato in a clean-ish room in a space lab may have
| deteriorated the same way that McDonald's burgers do in a
| kitchen environment full of nasty bacteria and mold spores -
| not much.
| pvaldes wrote:
| good time to seed it again, seeds could be viable
| koolba wrote:
| > Because of the weightless nature of space, any object that is
| unsecured or not tied down is likely to float off. And in the
| ISS, which is larger than a six-bedroom house, there's bound to
| be a plethora of good hiding spots for a lone-ranger tomato.
|
| The part about the ISS being the size of a six bedroom house
| really stuck with me. I always imagine it being a single cramped
| room. But now it's a floating McMansion!
| dieselgate wrote:
| Made me think of the Mitch Hedberg bit about "I just bought a 2
| bedroom house but it's up to me how many bedrooms there are
| though, isn't it? This bedroom has an oven in it... this
| bedroom is over in that guy's house"
|
| The ISS is larger (has more bedrooms) than I imagined too but
| using the "bedroom" descriptor is funny
| mkesper wrote:
| Even mansion doesn't seem quite fitting to me:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#/m.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_the_ISS_taken_dur.
| ..
|
| And all that was transferred part by part to space, having to
| be usable right from the start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Assembly_of_the_International_...
| sneak wrote:
| It has an absolute fuckton of gear inside of it, however. The
| camera equipment alone is quite a volume, to say nothing of all
| of the racks of stuff for experiments, exercise stuff, life
| support and water recycling, power storage, etc.
| looping8 wrote:
| Yes, the photo in the article looks very cramped. Probably
| the same tightness in all other areas of the station, with a
| few exceptions. I wonder if they make any changes to free
| space from time to time?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Is't it about 1000 m3 of pressurised space - presumably a lot
| of stores and equipment. I imagine in zero gravity the same
| size room would have a lot more 'space' too due to the lack of
| everything tending to concentrate on the 'floor' - so lots of
| places to hide.
| croisillon wrote:
| how many football pitch is a six bedroom house?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| 7 millilibraries of Congress.
| ainiriand wrote:
| It is so tiring to see these kind of 'measure' systems over and
| over again. Is that because the general public is unable to
| understand rational measures? Shouldn't be better to start
| using them so maybe the readers get the urge to understand
| them?
|
| I am not sure about this but I think something can be done,
| moreso from the people writing these articles. Maybe they can
| put a link to some website that explains rational measures.
| superhuzza wrote:
| The actual measurements aren't important to the story being
| told, at all. The story isn't about the ISS and how big it
| is, it's just a detail to add colour to the article.
|
| Writing a "six bedroom house" gets the idea across more
| easily than 388 cubic metres of habitable volume. I have no
| idea how big 388 cubic metres is but I have a rough idea of
| what sizes houses are.
|
| Communication is all about tailoring your message to your
| audience. On the NASA page linked to in the article, they use
| the house analogy in addition to the cubic metres - because
| they understand that rough approximations can sometimes be
| more useful information than hard figures.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I've been in one bedroom houses with 370m^2 floor space,
| and 4 bedroom houses with 175m^2. Those are outliers but I
| still have no mental idea of how big a six bedroom house
| is, at all. And the fact this is a usable volume makes the
| whole comparison useless.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Zillo new ads: "Half the size of the iss, open day
| Thursday"
| koolba wrote:
| "Very secluded neighborhood"
| aaron695 wrote:
| > now it's a floating McMansion!
|
| In reality it would be larger since it's used in 3D.
|
| You have 6 accessible surfaces. Most people only use their
| house in ~ 2 - 2.5 dimensions.
|
| Lots of other savings. Like stacking anvils on top of eggs in
| the cupboard and you can push things through space more
| optimized without the constraints of gravity. ie doors and
| hallways only have to be tight circles, you'll gain a lot
| there.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| The even more mind-blowing fact is that if SpaceX starship
| succeeds, it will be possible to launch a space station with
| half that volume in a _single launch_
| accrual wrote:
| I wish there was more details.
|
| tl;dr:
|
| - Astronaut grew tomatoes, picked the first one, then lost it
|
| - Spent a bunch of time looking for it, never found it
|
| - Returned to Earth, blamed for eating it
|
| - Other astronauts found it, but failed to provide photos or
| further details
|
| - Original astronaut exonerated
|
| - The end
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| If you want juicy space gossip there's a great report[1], with
| lots of complaints from space station residents, from food to
| schedule to cross-cultural friction.
|
| I always thought it would make a good Friends-meets-For All
| Mankind TV series.
|
| [1]:
| https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i feel the opposite. i enjoyed reading this article. amazing
| details.
| squarefoot wrote:
| - take seeds from tomato
|
| - plant them on Earth
|
| - start a business selling space tomatoes
|
| - ...
|
| - Fund mission to colonize Mars in 5 years
| popol12 wrote:
| That's journalism ? Sounds like they asked chatGPT to turn a pair
| of tweets into an article.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Now let's grow more
| JCharante wrote:
| It'll be pretty cool once they start growing more produce up on
| the ISS. I hope it shifts from experiment to mass production,
| although I guess there's plenty of optimizations (experiments) to
| be made.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| "While the President's press secretary Jim Richardson tries to
| convince the public that no credible threat exists, the President
| puts together a team of specialists to stop the tomatoes, led by
| a man named Mason Dixon"
|
| Wow that took a turn
| inamberclad wrote:
| Plenty of things get lost on the ISS. There is an entire team
| dedicated to trying to keep track of all the tools and equipment
| as they move around the station. One of the big selling points of
| the Astrobee robots on the ISS is that they may be able to search
| for lost tools without consuming astronaut time.
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