Intro music.
Strawberries and salad crops growing at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center in
Florida will provide more than nutrition to astronauts when they're on their way to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
In the state-of-the-art lab the plants are growing in environmental growth chambers that mimic the atmosphere on the International Space Station.
Plants are being tested for their ability to nourish the crew physically and psychologically and have been used for therapeutic purposes in space for years.
"On a long-duration mission, eventually they're going to miss looking at the Earth out of their windows. They're going to lose that perception,
lose that closeness to their home planet.
So one of the things that plants can provide is actually that psychological feel that they're bringing a piece of Earth with them."
While tending the crops, the crew exhales carbon dioxide which the plants need to survive.
The plants create oxygen in return creating a mutual life-cycle success story.
The tomato and strawberry crops will also add texture, fresh flavors and an antioxidants to the crew's prepackaged food diet.
"So they're taking a plant, they're taking something that they can go in and physically touch,
physically smell and get sort of a really relatively good feeling about their mission and sort of forget
about some of the stresses of all the work they have to do throughout the day."
On long-duration flights to fulfill the Vision for Space Exploration, astronauts will feel right at home, tending their little farm in the sky.