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The NASA astronaut returned to Earth from an interminable galactic journey at the end of September, after 371 consecutive days in space.
During his long mission, Frank Rubio orbited our planet some 5,936 times, and inadvertently lost a small tomato. He was part of a project called VEG-05, an experiment on how (or if) robin tomatoes could grow in space.
After being ‘left to ripen’ for a 100-day growing period, astronauts were allowed to examine them, but could not eat them due to the possibility of fungal contamination. Rubio’s test tomato floated in the low-gravity environment and was not found before the end of his more than year-long mission.
He himself admitted that he spent ’18 to 20 hours’ looking for the tomato on the huge surface of the ISS. Hopefully, someone will find it one day, some crumpled little thing in a Ziploc bag, and they’ll be able to prove I didn’t eat the tomato in space,’ he said.
Well, mystery solved: the missing tomato was finally found. We may have found something that someone has been looking for for a long time,’ ISS astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said last week during a question-and-answer session with the crew.
Moghbeli did not reveal any additional details, such as who was the great discoverer of the tomato or where on the space station it was located. However, the gastro-space mission has just been accomplished.