NEW DELHI: Chinese astronauts, who boarded the Shenzhou 16, have successfully harvested fresh vegetables in the Tiangong space station.
As a part of the plans for future deep space exploration, mission commander Jing Haipeng and rookie astronauts Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao cultivated vegetables in June and reaped four batches of lettuce. They continued their second operation in August with cherry tomatoes and green onions.
The Shenzhou-16 mission, China’s fifth manned mission to its space station since 2021, is part of the country’s ambitious space program. The astronauts are due to return to Earth on October 31, after handing over control of the station to the newly arrived Shenzhou 17 mission crew.
The China Astronaut Research and Training Center has also set up replicas on Earth, allowing researchers to compare results and more accurately analyze divergences in how plants grow in space and on the ground. This, researchers say, is part of a long-term plan to aid deep space exploration, reported Space.
While talking with the Chinese state media, CCTV, a researcher, Yang Renze, from the China Astronaut Research and Training Center said that the vegetable cultivation apparatus is a key part of the whole Environmental Control and Life Support System [ECLSS], and it is used in space to verify the relevant technologies.
The researcher further stated that in the future, they will focus on rapid and large-scale cultivation.
“The system can be applied to the field of deep space exploration, including our crewed lunar and Mars landing missions,” Yang said and added, “As a key part of the ECLSS, the plants grown from the cultivation apparatus can absorb carbon dioxide in the air to generate oxygen with the photosynthesis, and then regenerate and purify water with transpiration.”
China is working to put a pair of astronauts on the moon before 2030. It is also planning to build a moon base, called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), in the next decade. A crewed Mars landing is much further off, but the Red Planet has been noted as a future destination for Chinese spaceflight, as per Space.





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