Source: CCTV News Client
At present, the National Space Laboratory has been officially operated, and space applications have been carried out in an orderly manner, and phased application results have been harvested. Recently, the Shenzhou 16 astronaut crew achieved a bumper harvest through professional space cultivation devices on the Chinese space station.
This is the space cultivation device known as the "space vegetable garden", which is a modular simple space plant cultivation device designed by the researchers of the Chinese Astronaut Scientific Research and Training Center, which adopts an open structure, and astronauts can have close contact with plants at any time. The gas environment such as carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity and oxygen required for plant growth is basically the same as that of astronauts in the cabin, and the plant planting operation is simple and easy to take care of. Astronauts can also place the device arbitrarily in a lighted place in the cabin according to their personal preferences, adding a touch of greenery to their working and living environment. The lettuce planted this time received scientifically configured light and moisture, and it also grew gratifying in the space environment.
Previously, during the Shenzhou 11 and Shenzhou 14 missions, many astronauts have experienced the feeling of being a "space vegetable farmer" and successfully planted lettuce, wheat, rice and Arabidopsis. During the Shenzhou 11 mission, astronauts completed the whole process of sowing lettuce, cultivating and harvesting, and Shenzhou 14 astronauts also ate fresh vegetables grown in space on the Mid-Autumn Festival. In the future, the "space vegetable garden" will not only provide astronauts with food, oxygen and water, as a space experiment platform, but also play a role in studying the impact of special environments such as space microgravity on plant growth and development, physiology and biochemistry.
Up to now, the space station has arranged to implement 110 space science research and application projects in orbit, involving space life science and human body research, microgravity physics and new space technologies, obtaining nearly 100TB of original experimental data, and nearly 300 experimental samples downstream, and some projects have achieved phased application results.