News

Posted: Jan 31, 2024 - 12:00pm

New Mexico researchers and collaborating institutions are known to send some unique and unusual plants and vegetables into space – take for instance the green chile launch of 2019 – and this week, UNM Biology Professor David Hanson, his team, and Dr. Simon Gilroy, collaborator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sent up tomatoes.

The tomatoes took flight Monday, Jan. 29, 2024 on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of project Trichoderma Associated Space Tomato Inoculation Experiment – or TASTIE. Watch a recording of the launch here. Researchers hope to better understand how plants grow without gravity and if there are ways to help plants cope with the stressors involved with growing in space flight.

Read the full story at UNM Newsroom

UNM students interested in working on a NASA MINDS challenge to innovate technologies to autonomously grow crop plants for Artemis missions (travel to the moon and Mars), please visit the CHILI HOUSE application.