University Place

cc >> Good evening and welcome to UW Space Place. This is the second Tuesday of the month so we have a guest speaker tonight. Our guest speaker tonight is Professor Simon Gilroy in the UW-Madison botany department, and he's been at UW for a few years now, came to us from Penn State, where he tells me he was already beginning doing some of this research with plants in space, which has a long tradition also here at UW-Madison as we were talking about earlier. Simon has already flown some plants in space and is getting ready, is in the midst of preparations to do some more. And so he's going to tell us about that tonight in his talk "Spacefaring

Vegetables

Or Why Does NASA Launch So Much Lettuce?" Simon. >> All right. Thanks for the invitation. So, what I thought I would start out by doing is kind of giving you a feel for how a biologist thinks about going into space and how biology actually will really impact on how manned flight and manned exploration of the solar system is going to progress. And also I want to start off gratuitously with some shots from the Hubble just because they are fantastically engaging. This is actually from Hubble, which I think kind of captures the spirit of what most of the space science is about, which is it's kind of the human condition to want an explore and understand, and that journey of finding out how the universe works is the science that we're trying to conduct. And this is the Hubble Telescope. Giving us these absolutely fantastic views of how the universe, how the galaxies, and how the solar system works. And I still find it absolutely amazing that we can do this basically from sitting in our planetary armchair. We don't have to go anywhere in order to be able to make some really fundamental insights into how all of these places within the universe works. So, if we take this, this is just a few of my favorite advances which have come over the last couple of years. This is a view of the oldest galaxy that we can find. This has been taken from pictures from the survey called CANDELS. CANDELS is looking at the red shifts of galaxies, and this absolutely remarkable dot is the light coming from a galaxy which is receding from us, and from that red shift we can work out that this is 700, the light coming from that is 700 million years after the Big Bang. So that's a view of what the universe looked like about 5% of its time into being. So just an unbelievably detailed view of the history of the universe, and we didn't have to go anywhere in order to get that. Humans put the Hubble Telescope into orbit, and we were able to peer into the workings of the universe, which is absolutely remarkable. The galaxy has the fantastic name of Z8GND5296. How more inspiring is that?

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Vegetables

But just a remarkable view of the universe. We didn't go anywhere to find that. That information came to us through the Hubble Telescope. This is an absolutely awe inspiring picture. This is the Carina Nebula. This is where stars are being born, and what you can see here is super cool hydrogen mixed with gas and dust. We're seeing the birth of stars, and at the top here, you can see this pillar is being ripped apart by the energy firing out from the birth of stars. So this is the birth of stars that we're seeing. Absolutely an amazing view of the workings of the universe. Again taken with the Hubble, and again we didn't have to go anywhere in order to begin to take just these amazing insights into the workings of the universe, the workings of the galaxy. So we can come even a little bit closer and not have to go anywhere in order to begin to understand planets which are much, much closer to us. And we've all seen pictures like this. This is a remarkably detailed view of Mars. And you can begin to see things. There's the caps. This is a huge dust storm. There's another dust storm over here. This is from the Hellas crater, the impact crater. Begin to see the workings of one of our nearest neighbors with remarkable detail from our planetary armchair. We didn't have to go anywhere in order to get this kind of information. But the Hubble has its limitations, and eventually sitting there and looking through telescopes gives you amazing insights into the universe, but it's not quite the same as being there and finding out what's going on. And we can take another beautiful, wonderful step towards understanding what's going on by actually visiting these places. And so here is one of my favorite movies because it truly is, it's just such an amazing awe-inspiring thing. This is the Curiosity rover and it's drilling a hole and that's all the movie is. But if you look at the movie and think about what's going on and think about what it represents, it is an absolutely remarkable achievement of mankind to be able to do this. So this is the second hole that Curiosity has drilled on Mars. This is May the 19th. We're looking from the forward cameras, and we're going to loop it four times. But there's the drill going in, and there is mankind drilling a hole on another planet. It should be more awe-inspiring than this, I think. There it is again. We have to loop it because it's like, what happened? But if you think about what that entailed, that entailed us providing a surrogate researcher, a surrogate human being, we flew it all the way to Mars, we landed it there, and it was able to go and sample the surface of Mars. And Curiosity isn't going around drilling lots of holes. It's actually drilled very, very few holes. But the kind of information that we get from that you can see here. So this is actually that hole. It's in a rock, and that rock is so important we named it. It was named Cumberland. There's the hole. Here are the ground up remnants of the rock which came out of the hole. And those dots are from a piece of equipment called the ChemCam where researchers were able to go in and sample the chemical composition of that rock and use that information, for instance, to work out that this rock is probably in the range of about four billion years old, which puts it in the right range. It's on one of those great but like huh pieces of information. It puts it in exactly the range that we would expect for where Curiosity is driving around on the surface of Mars in the Gale crater. And I look at this and I think that is a remarkable achievement for mankind to have been able to fly to another planet and sample the rocks and be able to work out what's going on. And I look at this and I also think I have a drill at home in my workshop. I might need a long extension cord, but, man, I could drill a lot more holes than two holes with that drill. And robotics may have a huge impact of our exploration of the solar system. There's absolutely no question that that is an enormously fruitful way to go about trying to understand by being there. But at the same time, it's not quite the same as human beings being there with all of the flexibility and all of the abilities that we have. And so that's just kind of a prelude to think a little bit about. What I'm going to move on to now is to think about how we've replaced the robotics with a human being. And why would we want to do manned flight, and how would we support manned flight. And I'll tell you that as a plant biologist, manned flight is a huge challenge, but we will be there as an integral supporting part of it. So how do we put that together? How do you put astronauts, for instance, on the International Space Station to growing of lettuce. Both of those are going to be inextricably linked. So I want to just take a few steps now towards thinking about what it means to men into space, and then what the real limitations about a manned exploration of the universe is going to be, well the solar system to start with. A lot of reasons why we would want to have a manned presence off our planet. A manned presence, for instance, on Mars. Colonization is a lot what human beings do. Exploration would be a fantastic thing to be able to do. One of the best quotes I know of this that puts it into context is from Elon Musk, and he said, "I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact."

LAUGHTER

Vegetables

And this is part of being human. The drive to explore. Mars has been a goal for a long time It would just be absolutely fantastic to have a human, a sustained human presence on Mars. It would be an enormous leap forward for how mankind operates. So the colonization and exploration aspect of it is one thing. It's a natural human drive. That would be one reason that we would want to put a manned presence off-planet. A sustained manned presence off-planet. Here's another one. This is the ultimate insurance policy. Here's another fantastic quote.

Larry Niven

"Dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." And, at the moment, we really are putting all of our human eggs into one basket, and that basket is the Earth, and eventually the Earth is going to be hit by something and it's going to be hit by something big enough that it's going to be devastating to humans. And so sustained presence off the planet is really the only way, a manned presence that does not require to revisit the Earth, is the only way that we're going to have the insurance policy of the human species surviving forever. So there's a lot of these kind of ideas about why we need to have a manned space presence. There's another two which I actually prefer. I like these much more as the reason to drive why we would want to support humans off-planet. So this is Konstantin and however you want to pronounce his surname, Tsiolkovsky. He is the father of the Russian space program, Russian rocketry. He was the father of astronautics, which is the idea of taking human beings off the surface of the planet. And he has perhaps what the best reason to do it is. Earth is the cradle of humanity. No one can live in a cradle forever. Maybe it's time. We have reached the natural point in technological advancement that this is what we should be doing. And this is fantastic. This quote is over the elevators at Kennedy Space Center. This is a big, big thing. The great drive about what human achievement is, exploration, science, and all those rolled into the fact that we can do it now, maybe this is something that we should be doing. This is just the natural place where we should be. And then we come back to Hubble where we started, but this really is human nature that we want to explore, we want to understand how the universe works, and in reality we want to do it in person. And so that's kind of the launching point for thinking about how do you have a sustained human presence in space. We've had a manned human presence in space for quite a long time now in a lot of different guises, but we think about one of the classic ones, one of the big ones that was the milestone about thinking about how biological systems, now whenever we think about biological systems we general think about humans, but how we take biological systems and move them away from the surface of the planet, this very thin layer on the surface of the Earth that we inhabit, and how do we move that out into the rest of the solar system. And so what was that milestone? That milestone was a long time ago. We think about the Apollo system, the landing on the moon. There's the iconic image of a footprint on another planetary body. So Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of another planet, that is biology being moved away from the surface of the Earth. But I always called this, this is the most awe-inspiring camping trip humans have ever made. It's because there was no intention of staying there, and it required a lot of resources to be taken with you in order to even camp on the surface of the moon for a while, and then we had to come back. And we haven't been there since. We've looked around. It's like going to Hawaii. You fly there from Madison. So it's minus four degrees. You get on a plane. You end up in Hawaii. Kind of nice. You hang out there, and then after a while you have to come home because you've run out of money. It's that kind of, the mentality of we're going to go somewhere but we know we're not going to stay there. And what you do in Hawaii is not what you do to live in Madison because you're on holiday. It's a camping trip. But we know we can do it. We know we've been able, in the past, to take humans, fly them somewhere else, get out, and move around. But there are a lot of problems which have rolled into this, and now we'll have to start rolling into thinking about how biological systems operate under these circumstances. Because the limitation is not going to be the engineering. You look at the space agencies and look at a place like NASA or ESA or JAXA or the Russian Space Agency, these have fantastic engineers. We already know we can fly to Mars. We've already done it. We already know. We have spacecrafts which have left the solar system. Engineering is what we do well, and the engineers in the commercial and the government run space agencies are fantastically good. So building spacecrafts that will take us to various places is what we will be able to do. We could do it now. If we really wanted to now, we could go to Mars. I could put you in a rocket, I could get you to Mars. It would cost a lot of money and you'd probably be dead by the time you got there, but I could totally get you to Mars.

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Larry Niven

Because that's an engineering solution. The limitation on the manned presence in space and biological presence in space is not the engineering. This is the problem. You are here. You, I am 100% certain, are here on the Earth. And so were your parents. And the thing about the Earth is it's kind of a nice place to be if you're a piece of biology. Your parents lived there. If your parents did not live on the Earth, I would really like to talk to you.

LAUGHTER

Larry Niven

Your parents' parents lived on the Earth. Your parents' parents' parents lived on the Earth. You get where I'm going. Every human being who has lived has lived on the Earth. Every piece of biology which has existed exists on the Earth. The limitation from going from the surface of the Earth into space is a limitation not of engineering, we know how to do that, it's a limitation of how biological systems have evolved and what happens when you take them away from the cuddly friendly place that the surface of the Earth is. And a lot of stuff starts happening, and that's the stuff that a lot of our research in the biological sciences are interested in trying to work out and then trying to work out how to get around. So let's now take the question of biology living on the surface of the Earth and moving it into space and begin to ask the questions about, okay, what happens and why does it happen. And some of the things I'll talk about now, you will know and they're very, very obvious. Some of the other effects that space flight has on biology are a lot more subtle and a lot more tricky to understand but have enormous impacts on how biological systems work. So, let's take the starting point. Here's the starting point about why biology has such a hard time when we move it away from the surface of the Earth. It's because we evolved on the surface of the Earth, and one of the big things about the Earth is it provides one times g, one times gravity. And one times gravity is a really, really good thing, and we rely on it as biological systems. And we've never experienced long-term periods of different levels of gravity. The Earth is 1 x g. You are being held down at the moment by one times gravity. You weigh as much as you did this morning, and you know 1 x g is impacting on you enormously as a piece of biology and that in evolutionary time biology evolved on the Earth has never had to cope with different levels of gravity. So let's think about now going up into the International Space Station, into the weightless environment of the space station. The space station, things are weightless because the space station is in free fall. And on Earth, biology avoids free fall as much as it can. We do a lot to avoid going into the free fall weightless environment. Long periods of free fall on Earth are what biologists would call heavy negative selection. If you experience repetitive long periods of free fall, your genes are probably not going to be passed on to the next generation. But at evolutionary level, the time frames that we would have to be talking about for a piece of biology to have to develop a system to cope with different levels of gravity would be a biological system which was experiencing different levels of gravity over many generations, and that is not what occurs on the Earth. So Earthbound biology, terrestrial biology, is inexplicably linked to 1 x g, and our biology is entrained to 1 x g. And all biology is entrained to 1 x g. It is the most pervasive force on the planet. You can't get rid of it. It doesn't matter what you do, biology has had to deal with it. And so the big problem that we're going to have in taking biological systems and moving them off the surface of the planet for a long period of time, so no longer camping trips but thinking about living on the International Space Station, the next mission that's going to go up there, long-term mission will be one year. One year away from the surface of the Earth and that really critical 1 x g causes a lot of problems. Terrestrial biology does not have an intrinsic mechanism to deal with variations in the level of gravity. It just never happened in our evolutionary path, but we're going to now put biological systems, we always think about humans, we are going to put humans into an environment we are not equipped to deal with by how we've evolved. All right. The other thing is we have this thing that space biologists, I like to call it space syndrome. Space is not a nice place. Forget the lack of gravity. As far as biology is concerned, space is kind of a nasty place to hang out. And one way to think about that is when you move, let's go out where the space station is, 200 miles away from the surface of the planet. The radiation dosage that you're getting there is much, much higher than the radiation dosage that you would get if you're on the surface of the planet. We have a great magnetic shield that protects us. And there is no Star Trek kind of shield that you can put up around the space station to protect astronauts from that increased radiation dosage. The way that you protect people at the moment from radiation is you put a lot of stuff between you and the radiation source. So let's say the radiation source is the sun. We have to put a lot of stuff between the astronauts inside the space station and the sun, and it costs a lot to put a lot of stuff into space. So we don't have the big shielding which would allow you to protect astronauts. They are receiving a lot of radiation. And one of the reasons that the mission in the space station, the astronauts are up there for the limited time they are is because they are receiving their lifetime dose of radiation. So, think about that. But we know biology receives radiation on the Earth. Biology has responses to the damage that radiation gives you on Earth. That's a natural evolutionary kind of force, but now you have to think about what it means to go into space. We're going to take that stretch, that biological input, and now put it against the background of a biological system, human being, working in microgravity, in weightlessness, in this environment that our biology doesn't normally know how to, really has never had to deal with. So the problem of space flight is not only things like no gravity, but it's this weird mix of things, of being in this strange environment of space flight with a lot of stressful inputs that do things like suppress your immune system change how biology works against this really strange background of lowered levels of gravity that our biology has not had to deal with. And so that's the space syndrome which is the driving problem for putting a sustained biological presence in space. The biology changes in the space environment, and we have to understand a lot more about that before we can send people off to Mars and be pretty happy that by the time they get there, they're not either going to be dead, which would be kind of bed, or terminally disabled by something that's happened to them or the radiation has caused so much neurological damage that they're terminally stupid. There's a lot of stuff that can happen that we're going to have to understand. So, I'm going to talk a lot now about space syndrome, but I want to just drive home the fact that the other thing that moving biology into space gives us is just this unbelievably powerful laboratory environment. We can do experiments in space that we simply can't do on the Earth. I cannot remove gravity on the Earth. I can't work out what gravity is doing to your body at the moment because the experiment I would really like to do is remove gravity and see what changes, and I simply can't do that. We know gravity is an incredibly intrinsic part of biology, 1 x g, and now we have a laboratory environment in space where we can play with that variable and begin to understand how it's impacting on you at the moment. And what we now know from space flight is it's having an enormous impact just when you're sitting there in the audience of this talk. Gravity is making your biology work. So, let's think a little bit about now taking these kind of ideas and then moving them and ask what happens to biological systems when we move them into space. All right. So, this is the space station. This is one of the first expeditions onto the space station, and here we have astronauts doing what astronauts do. We know this is all astronauts do. They just float around inside the space station having an immense amount of fun. It must be absolutely awesome because here's an immense amount of fun. This guy is weightless. He's in free fall. And so you can do these amazing things. You can push yourself with a finger and just move forever. You can lift a thousand-pound piece of equipment with that same one finger. But what's happened is that the load which is on his biological system, the load which is operating on humans on the surface of the Earth at the moment, that pull of 1 x g, has disappeared. And so a bunch of biological responses which are driven by 1 x g are now going to be screwed up, and you will know a lot of these and heard about a lot of them. So what does change. There's no load. At the moment, as you're sitting upright or standing upright, gravity is pulling the fluids in your body down to your feet. And your heart is designed by evolution to pump them right back up again. It's keeping you alive. You move into a weightless environment and there's no gravity pulling all the fluids down to your feet, but your heart is still pumping them up to your head. So if you look at astronauts in the first couple of days that they're in space, they look like Mr. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Their heads swell up, they get headaches because all of the fluids are redistributed into their head. Over the course, biology is awesome. Biology is fantastically adaptable, and over the course of a few days your heart and your fluid system kind of works its way out, and your head comes down a little bit. But it tells you, if you think about the moment, gravity is driving the distribution of fluids in your body, and that's a good thing. 1 x g you are adapted to work there. Move yourself into space, weird stuff is going to start to happen. We'll come back to the fluids in just a minute. What else happens? Well the two things that we always think about when astronauts are long-term in space. They lose muscle mass and they lose bone mass because at the moment, irrespective of whether you're standing up or laying down, gravity is pulling on you and your muscles are fighting against it to let you move and your bones are supporting you against a load and your biological systems are sensing that load and your bones are actively responding to the load which is put on them by maintaining the bone mass. And as soon as you go and remove that mass, it's the same thing as if you're on long-term bed rest. You start losing muscle mass and losing bone mass, and you get to the point of having osteoporosis. Astronauts have to work extremely hard with countermeasures against this. We don't have to do exercise. It's a good thing, but you don't have to do exercise. Astronauts, in order to maintain the physique that they had when they went in space, have to do a lot of exercise. And so here's the COLBERT treadmill. And this is one of the astronauts from Expedition 37 on the ISS. And here is a large part of your day as an astronaut. Jogging on a treadmill, doing weight exercises, a lot of resistance exercises in order to try and mimic 1 x g because they are losing bone and muscle mass to the point of where when they come back to the Earth they are incredibly compromised. There are some other really cool things when you look at this. The treadmill is on bungees because I have to start thinking that we're in a weightless environment. As you're running along, you're bouncing up and down, and if the treadmill was attached to the station, the station starts to bounce up and down because you're applying enough force to it, and then the solar panels start wobbling up and down. If they did enough exercise they'd break the things off. So there's a lot, the physics of being in a weightless environment start to impact on a lot of things. So a lot of countermeasures. Some of the countermeasures we can kind of call easy. They don't work very well, but they're kind of easy. Exercise I would count as one of the easy countermeasures. We know how to do treadmills. We know how to lift weights and all that kind of stuff. There are a lot of other things that happen to you in space where the countermeasures and the causes are a lot less understood. One which has come up fairly recently and may be a big one is your eyesight changes when you're in space. And we're not entirely certain why, but astronauts go onto the ISS with perfect vision and come back and lose a lot of visual acuity to the point where there's now laser eye monitoring going on in the station because we know something's going on but we don't know what. Whether it's the fluid changes in the back of your eye causing differences in the pressure and that's causing changes in the function or blood flow or something like that. But if you go into space, you will damage your eyes, and not from the radiation of cataracts, that kind of thing will happen, but from just something that we're not entirely certain what's going on but now we know it occurs. Kind of a subtle biological change but potentially really, really important for putting a piece of biology in space. Here's another thing that you might not necessarily think about but has an enormous impact on how the astronauts work, taking a piece of biology that works on the surface of the Earth and moving it into space. Think about what it is to be in the space station. You're traveling at five miles a second. You're 200 miles up. You're going around the Earth at five miles a second. That means the sun rises every 90 minutes. You have a 90-minute day. That totally screws you up because sleep is a really important thing. Biological rhythms are fantastically important for all biology. They're present in human beings. They're present in plants. And a 24-hour day, approximately 24-hour day, is what we have evolved to deal with. Now we put astronauts in a 90-minute day. And so here is a picture of what that can do to you. So this is an astronaut working on the surface of the Columbus lab when it was being put together. This is an astronaut doing extravehicular activity. One of the most dangerous things you can do in space. You put a spacesuit on and you go outside. That spacesuit keeps you alive. And the training, these are absolute perfectionists, absolute experts on extravehicular activity. They spend an enormous amount of time training for it. They put the suits on. They're incredibly careful. They have people checking everything. Can anyone see what's wrong with this picture? I can give you a hint. He's got his boots on the wrong feet.

LAUGHTER

Larry Niven

Disruption of sleep cycles, the stresses of being up there can have really, really subtle effects on your cognitive abilities, and this is really important. Now, you get away with it here, and this guy is an expert and knows what he's doing in this work, but all of these changes to biology are changing, and I've been concentrating on humans, I'm going to step away from humans now, it's changing how biological systems work because your biology is entrained to 1 x g, the surface of the Earth. So here's humans. What other biology is going to go with us? What other biology is going to be up there in space? What is up there at the moment? Well, we will not leave Earth alone, and we are not leaving Earth alone. The astronauts who go into space, the astronauts on the International Space Station, the International Space Station is not a sterile environment. It's not the science fiction view of science. You are covered in microbes at the moment. That's a good thing. We'll come back there in a minute. There are a ton of microbes that come up on the space station because the space station is where biology works, and it's not sterile. So here's an example of just some of the stuff that happens in space which biology has an impact on which is kind of complicated to deal with. Space station is not sterile. This is one of the panels from inside the space station, and the thing that you can see here is something growing on the surface of the panel. This is like your ceiling when you have a leak. There's some moldy stuff growing on it. We still don't know what this is. What happened is that the astronauts, remember they have to exercise so much in all of the day, a couple hours a day in order to stay healthy, so they wash up, they hang their exercise clothes up somewhere. They hung it up here, and what happened was stuff started growing on the panel. And they tried really, really hard to decontaminate it with wipes and stuff like that, could not get rid of it, and this is microbes taking over the space station. And, eventually, couldn't work out what it was, couldn't get rid of it, pulled that panel off, and do what you do to garbage that you want to get rid

of in the space station

burn it up on reentry. So, microbes are up there already, and so we will not leave Earth alone. Microbes are with us. The other thing about microbes and the part that I want to talk about a little bit now is that we cannot leave Earth alone. Now we're going to have to start thinking about biological systems are altered in space. We want to have a sustained presence of human beings in space. If we put human beings up there on their own, we can't have a sustained presence in space. Microbes and plants are going to have to come with us. Microbes are already up there. Actually, plants are already up there. But microbes, remember, there are more microbes in your body at the moment than there are human cells. Your microbial population is fantastically important for keeping you healthy. And so when we have a sustained human presence in space, we have to have a sustained microbial presence in space. And the microbial thing is really, really important, and it's something we really don't understand too much about what happens to microbes in space in that weightless environment. But I just want to now shift on to thinking a little bit about why would we put plants in space and what does that give us for a sustained presence of humans in space. How does it get around to some of the problems that we've been talking about, and, also, what do we need to know, which will get us a little bit to the end towards what my research is at the moment. Plants keep us alive. So, what do you get from plants? The planet, you can describe the Earth as a blue planet, or you can describe it as a green planet. It's kind of a greeny-blue planet, actually. And the photosynthetic activity of plants is really what's keeping us all alive at the moment. So, if we think about that, what do you get when you put plants into a biological environment? All of the food that we eat comes from plants. And you can say but I had a McDonald's hamburger. I hope you didn't, but you could say it. I had a McDonald's hamburger for lunch. What's the beef? Beef is just another way of saying grass or corn. All of our food comes from plants. That productivity feeds us, and it's the only way we know how to do it sustainably. So if we're going to put a sustained human presence into space and we're going to feed it, we are not going to send spacecraft after spacecraft full of Twinkies to Mars to keep people alive. We're going to have to make our own food, and the way that we make food and the way that we know works is by plants. So, that's point one for why we want to work out if we can use plants in space to keep astronauts alive. Take them to Mars. Take them to the moon. Keep people alive there by feeding them. The other thing that plants are really good at doing is they clean the air. They take out carbon dioxide, they produce oxygen, they're a great part of a life support system, and they are the way that we know works on Earth. We know this works, maybe it would work in space. They're really good at cleaning water as well, so they provide part of a biological resupply system. We can reuse water, and we can use plants as part of a system to clean that up. So this is all part of what we call bioregenerative life support system. We want to use biology as part of the way of maintaining the environment for the astronauts. This is long-term. The Earth has been around for quite a long time, and we're on it because plants are keeping us alive doing all of this stuff. The other thing which we're now realizing is fantastically important but we hadn't really, the plant biologists in the space game really hadn't caught on to this yet but now we know is fantastically important is plants keep you sane. So this, I don't know if any of you followed it, this is the space zucchini. The space zucchini wrote a blog while he or she was on the International Space Station. This is a zucchini plant which was grown by one of the astronauts, Don Pettit. And he just took up some zucchini seeds, grew them in a Ziploc back, purpose built plant growth facility, a Ziploc bag, he made space compost and grew this plant, and it was fantastic the link that the astronauts have to the green stuff which was growing around them. And the idea of having plants around seems to be a really important thing. And we think what it does is it provides a very good link to your life on Earth. And there's a very strong psychological link between humans and plants growing around us. And so taking them into space has actually been a really, really important thing. And we know that, for instance, there are greenhouses in the McMurdo Station in the Antarctic, and that greenhouse is a hub where people congregate because bright light and a lot of green stuff. There's a very deep psychological link there. So food, air, water, and stopping you from killing each other sounds like a pretty good deal. So it turns out there are a lot, plants are grown in space a lot because of this, and we want to understand a lot about them. And the good thing is plants kind of grow okay in space. There's not some great problem that we thought there would be. Plants clearly know the direction of gravity. They have a fantastic sense system. Plants know up from down. A tree shoot grows up, roots grow down. They have a very, very good biological system that keys into that cue, and it's very important for them, and we for a long time have thought when we take that cue away and try to grow them in space, something bad will happen. It turns out that plants are a lot cleverer than that, and the key into other aspects of the environment in order to know which direction to put the roots and which direction to put their shoots. So we can grow plants in space. And here's an example of a plant growth facility. This is a thing called the Veggie. This is going to go up on SpaceX 3 very soon, and it's a test bed for, we always think that NASA equipment is this fantastically high tech system, and this is a high tech system but it's also a very, very simple system. And what we have is a bank of LEDs on the top, a tray where we put soil-like pads and seeds in, and then the plants start growing. And this thing, which looks like a shower curtain, is kind of a shower curtain, it's a concertina. And as the plants grow taller, first of all, the lights stop very close to the plants. And as the plants grow taller, we just stretch the lights further and further away. So that we can grow in a very controlled kind of simple environment the kind of plants that we would want to use for these kinds of things like air purification, feeding the astronauts, keeping the astronauts sane. What kind of plants are we going to put up there? Well, this system, if you think about the idea that we would like at the end of this thing to be able to grow plants that could, for instance, feed astronauts, it's not going to be corn. It's probably not going to be soybean. It's going to be plants that grow quickly, that you eat most of it, and that have that psychological aspect to them. And so the kind of plants which are target crops for the Veggie are things like lettuce and peas, spinach, things which are leafy that you eat a lot of the biomass that you're producing. This piece of equipment actually has a very strong link to Madison because one of the developing companies for this, does a lot of the lighting and things like that, is a company called Orbitec, which is in Madison. It's one of the leaders in this. But this is the kind of growth facility that you can imagine. There are a lot of different, I'll show you a few other ones, a lot of different growth facilities all aimed at doing different kinds of aspects of trying to work out how to most efficiently generate that biomass. Like I said, this is going up as part of a KSC project going up on SpaceX 3. We will find out how well this works later on this year. Well, not we but the people at KSC. Here is a greenhouse system in the -- module. This is a greenhouse thing called --. Growing plants, this is part of the psychological thing. So this is a cosmonaut checking how well the plants are growing, and that system is built with a little door on the front so that you can open it up. And partly that's part of the understanding how the plants are growing, we're able to take pictures and things like that, and partly because it allows an astronaut to look at a growing thing on the space station. So a lot of different growth things. Here we have things like wheat growing there. You can imagine wheat might be a crop which we'd want to grow there. Here's another one. This is white spruce. Don't worry, we are not going to try and make the astronauts eat white spruce. This is a piece of science being conducted, and what this is is an astronaut trying to work out, taking samples from white spruce. White spruce is a model that plant biologists use to try and understand how lack of gravity affects plants. So we're going to have the same biological problems that we have with humans that I discussed before, but now we have another biological system entrained to one times gravity, and in this case it is a plant. And plants use that information from gravity. The weight of a plant is important to itself in order to, just like humans without gravity, the astronaut's biology kind of gets lazy, plant biology gets lazy without gravity. If there's no weight on a spruce, it does not generate the strengthening tissues that it would have Earth. But that really does impact on how this plant grows. So this is a piece of biological research to understand what happens when we unload spruce. A lot of weird things happen in space. The unloading thing is kind of an obvious one. A strange thing happens to how liquids flow, and this now really important to the biological questions which my research is really interested in, which is basically what happens when you suffocate a plant. But here's Chris Hadfield. This is a classic, awesome movie that he did on the space station about what happens to water in microgravity. He's taking just a washcloth, and he's simply going to wring it out. And on Earth we know what would happen. You would wring it out and the water would fall down. If I did it over my computer, I would be unhappy. He's going to do it in space. >> So he's wringing it and you can begin to see some of the water is flying off. But you can begin to see it's not really going anywhere, and it just sits as a sheath. Awesome. And look at his hands. His hands are coated with a layer of water as well. And now he's going to, I think just in a minute, he's going to try and let go of this thing. And he lets go of it, and it just sticks to his hands. That is surface tension in water, the cohesion of water holding a layer of water over the surface of what it's in contact with because there is no gravity to pull it away from that surface. Imagine, now, you are watering a plant. Imagine that washcloth is the plant and I pour water on the surface of the plant. I pour it into the soil. It sticks to the surface of the soil. And we know what happens if you have a lot of water, for instance, lying around the root system of a plant. This is what happens. So if you flood a field, you eventually kill the plants. In reality what you're doing is the water is driving the air out from around the root system in the soil, and the roots of this plant are suffocating. And that's why after a while a flooded field, the plants start to die. Now, this is what happens on Earth. We flood a field, water sits over the surface of the roots, the plants slowly but surely suffocate and die. We think about Chris Hadfield's wringing out of the towel, that's set up all the time in space. If you pour water on something, it tends to stick by capillary forces and surface tension to that thing. It will stick to the surface of a root, and it will start to suffocate that root. So that should have a big impact on how biology works. Fortunately, we work in the world of space science, and there are physicists who can come to the aid of this. And here is a great way of thinking about how you can begin to solve that problem, which is a true problem, and we have to think about how we're going to move water away. And so here is Don Pettit on the International Space Station working out how to drink coffee out of a mug. If you put coffee in a mug on the space station and start moving around, it just floats away. This is coffee dealt with by a physicist. This is how, if a biologist and a physicist talk to each other, you work out how to overcome a fantastically difficult problem. So, this is a zero g coffee mug. It's got a little narrow neck to it, and that little narrow neck is at exactly the right angle to draw, by capillary forces, the liquid up. It comes up to the top, and you can continuously drink from it. And it just doesn't flow anywhere, and it gets to exactly where you want. The idea for this comes from the veins inside the fuel tanks of rockets that have liquid propellents that have to be lit again in space. You have to get the liquid to the right place. Isn't that awesome? It's just like a very simple way of dealing with a fluids problem, and we can apply those kind of ideas to now try and wick water to the correct place for a root system. So, water doesn't move around in a normal way in space. Here's another thing which you might not necessarily immediately think of but is absolutely true in space. There is no convective forces driven by buoyancy. So if you take a flame, the reason that it looks the way it does here on Earth is because the hot gases from the top of the flame are being drawn up, oxygen is being drawn in at the bottom, and gravity is moving stuff down. The heaviest stuff is going down, the lighter, expanded, hot gases are moving up. That gives you the shape of a flame. That's driven by convective forces. If I put a flame into microgravity or zero gravity, then it looks like this. It burns as a sphere because it's all by diffusion. There's not convective forces. Convective forces mix gases around extremely effectively. A root system of a plant in the soil, gases are mixed by convection. And oxygen is resupplied to the roots. The roots are breathing and they're using up oxygen and convective forces within the soil are every bit as important for that root system as it was for the shape of that flame. So, those convective forces disappear in space. So you have to imagine that you're a plant growing and your roots are using up oxygen, and now the normal forces, the normal mixing of gases which would resupply the oxygen don't exist. So you could, again, suffocate in space. So we know these problems exist. As plant researchers, how do we get around them? Well, this is the experiments that we were able to send up on SpaceX 2. So we've been trying to understand how plants deal with that problem of low oxygen for a long time. This is a great synergy from the National Science Foundation and NASA. We have two programs that just excellently intermesh. With the National Science Foundation and NASA work, we've been able to understand some of the genes which are important for that ability to understand a plant knows it's got low oxygen and mount some kind of defense response against it, mount some kind of way of dealing with it. And so we were able to pinpoint a couple of genes which are really important for that process and engineer those genes so that the plant, I like to think of it, the plant is, instead of going like, oh, there's low oxygen, it's going, there's low oxygen! I just think this plant is screaming out a response all the time. They have great names. We call them cax2 and aca1. These are two genes that we're able to engineer. We can engineer plants to be more resistant to this low oxygen stress. And this is, if we look here, this is just some seedlings which we've given a low oxygen stress to. And here are the engineered plants, still green and happy. And this is what we call the normal or wild type plants. And these plants are beginning to die. So we have a way of manipulating plants to deal on Earth with this low oxygen stress. So, what do they do in space? We know that space should have a problem of the root system running out of oxygen because of no convection and because of liquid films forming on it. So, what we were able to do is do an, everything in NASA has to have an acronym. I actually got a phone call from a guy in NASA saying the most important thing we need for your experiment before we can fly it, we need to have an acronym for it. So we literally sat down, we were having lunch in a restaurant and it truly was on the back of napkin. And so the transcriptome is all of the genes in an organism, and so we have the test of Arabidopsis, that's the kind of plant we're flying, space transcriptome, TOAST. So our experiment is TOAST. And what we were able to do earlier this year is load seeds into dishes, load them into a piece of hardware called the BRIC. It truly is called the BRIC. Biological acronym, right? Biological Research in Canisters. We sealed this up, and I still cannot believe they let us do this, we launched this thing on SpaceX 2. Absolutely awesome experience to see the rocket launch. At highs and lows. The Dragon capsule got into orbit. All telemetry was lost. We thought our experiment was toast. And then the telemetry came back, the Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station. Our seeds germinated in the space station. We didn't, some very nice people who live there froze them for us. We brought them back down. They splashed back down, and we got the frozen samples and now we are analyzing what happened to the normal plants we put in space but also these mutant plants which should be much, much happier living in space because of the low oxygen. And we literally are analyzing these things now, and we kind of think that the engineered plants are different. And if I was giving you this talk in January, I would be able to tell you exactly what was different. This is research so we're just at the point of knowing something was changed. So at the moment, the best I can do to tell you yes we got something to work, is that these are highly magnified pictures of the little seedlings that we got back from space which we're analyzing at the moment. But we really do think that this idea of understanding how it works on Earth, engineering the plants to be adapted now to this environment that they've never seen before, biologists have never seen before space flight, and tailoring the plants to space flight is going to be a really powerful approach. And fortunately NASA must think this is good too because very soon, next year we'll be doing TOAST 2. In BRIC 19, it's the 19th version of this hardware called BRIC, which we are hoping to launch on SpaceX 4, we literally came back from Florida last Friday doing our first tests of this new set up. So if you're interested in following the evolution of this, we have a blog which is going on which is updated to kind of give you a feel. It gives you a feel for what it means to try and take that biological idea and move it through the bureaucracy and the engineering of NASA and actually get it onto the station. And I say it is an absolutely fantastic honor that they allow us to do this because this is an opportunity very, very few people get. But we think we're making some progress towards understanding how maybe to get plants to operate optimally in space with that idea of putting them as part of a biological life support system. So if I would give you this talk next year, I'd probably be able to tell you not only what happened in our first experiment but what results we got from TOAST 2. But with that, I think what I'll do is I'll leave you with this picture. So this is the idea that we should be able to be growing plants as a biological system to grow in space. This is part of an experiment. This is not a mockup of a science fiction dome. This is actually a piece of equipment which is being used to try and work out how to grow lettuce for the surface of Mars. So that's kind of the goal, the eventual goal, understand a lot more about plants, but also be able to take them as our green buddies with us. And they really will be the thing that will keep us alive long-term in space. But I think I'll stop there and take any questions that people have.

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