Some of the mysteries of outer space are truly difficult to uncover. Is the universe infinite? Will we find extraterrestrial life? Where the hell did that tomato go?
NASA astronauts were testing the growth of vegetables on the International Space Station. The project is called Veg-05 and focuses on the impact of light quality and fertilizer on yield, microbial food safety, nutritional value, taste acceptability by the crew, and the overall behavioral health benefits of having plants and fresh food in space.
That’s all well and everything, but at some point, a tomato went missing. Not any tomato, mind you — the first tomato grown in space.
When the prized veggie (or is it a fruit?) suddenly disappeared a couple of months ago, astronaut Frank Rubio was blamed for eating the tomato.
“But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato,” NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said in a live-streamed event.
The bizarre case of the missing space tomato
“Well, we might have found something that someone had been looking for for quite a while,” Moghbeli quipped.
It was a truly bizarre thing. The missing tomato was first brought up on September 13, when Rubio had his own livestream celebrating a year in orbit as an astronaut.
“I spent so many hours looking for that thing,” Rubio joked during the ISS livestream in September. “I’m sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future.”
So how does one lose a tomato on the space station?
Well, the ISS is about as big as a seven-bedroom house. Finding things in microgravity is also more difficult than in your house because they can float to unexpected places (both up and down).
“I harvested, I think, what was the first tomato in space, and I put it in a little bag,” Rubio recalled in a NASA interview in October. He said he ended up taking the tomato out of the safety of the Ziploc bag to show some students the prized produce but seemed to misplace it afterward.
“I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it, and then I came back and it was gone,” the scientist said.
Rubio lamented that he spent some 20 hours looking for it and was unsuccessful.
“The reality of the problem, you know — the humidity up there is like 17%. It’s probably desiccated to the point where you couldn’t tell what it was, and somebody just threw away the bag,” Rubio added, laughing. “Hopefully somebody will find it someday: a little, shriveled thing.”
Now, the missing tomato has been uncovered. Moghbeli didn’t mention when and how the tomato was rediscovered. We also don’t know if the tomato is still plump or all shriveled, as Rubio predicted. But it was indeed vindication for Rubio, who returned to Earth on 27 September after spending a record 371 days in space, the most for any US astronaut in history.
