Science Verification Test Harvest

Three crops grown under a test condition representative of the International Space Station are photographed moments before harvest for a science verification test (SVT) in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 30, 2019. The SVT will study the potential of the three plant cultivars to grow in space. The harvest included ‘outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce, which has been grown in space before, and two new plant cultivars – amara mustard and shungiku, an Asian green comparable to an edible chrysanthemum. All three lettuce plants were grown from seed film, making this the first SVT with this new plant growth material. Earlier this year, the amara mustard and shungiku plants were grown for the first time using seed bags – referred to as pillows – during the Sustained Veggie project, a study funded by the Human Research Program.