25 August 2026, Beijing: A information report from China Science Communication:
The Shenzhou-17 astronaut crew harvested contemporary greens from the Tiangong Area Station’s “Area Backyard”. With the harvest nurtured collectively by the Shenzhou-16 and Shenzhou-17 groups, the astronauts picked and tasted the produce in orbit, whereas getting ready for the cultivation of latest crops. This marked regular progress in China’s on-orbit plant cultivation experiments.
Rising crops 400 kilometers above the Earth comes with distinctive challenges that don’t exist on the bottom. The microgravity setting disrupts the water-air trade in plant roots, and there’s no pure daylight contained in the area station cabin. To unravel these issues, the R&D workforce has geared up the area station with particular breathable cultivation substrates and capillary water provide techniques, which might stably preserve the water provide for plant roots. On the similar time, customized LED lighting techniques with tailor-made spectra are put in to simulate the optimum gentle setting for crop development, making certain that vegetation can full photosynthesis easily and develop usually.
Supported by controlled-release fertilizer expertise and a mature in-orbit breeding system, the “Area Backyard” has realized the complete life-cycle cultivation of crops “from seed to seed”. It’s steadily exploring a self-sustaining vegetable planting mode to scale back reliance on floor materials resupply. This progressive area planting system not solely offers contemporary meals assist for astronauts’ long-duration on-orbit missions, but in addition accumulates helpful aerospace agricultural experimental knowledge, opening up new instructions for the event of future aerospace agriculture.
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