Harvesting in 30 Parabolas
Watching the reels roll in of the recent parabolic flight campaigns focusing on women's health topics has left me nostalgic for my previous parabolic flight experiments. I decided to write a little about one of our research campaigns. Here's a photo of the setup.
Harvesting Plants in 30 Parabolas
Our flight experiment was all about testing harvesting methods. We grew microgreens in different hardware configurations and we harvested them in a ZeroG parabolic flight. One piece of handheld hardware was harvested in each instance of Microgravity. To test this, we rode on the Vomet Comet!
How do we not get sick?
People ask this question, so let's address it first. A lot of scientists who fly parabolic flights with their experiments medicate with something like meclizine or scopolamine. But when it comes down to it the movements in and out of 2g and Microgravity and 1g are rhythmic and soothing. I quickly came to expect the next. 2g is like a big hug. Microgravity like a release. And the brief breaks of 1g just feel weird.
Can you compare it to something more people experience?
Honestly, for me? The timing of parabolic flights feels very much like the rollercoaster of labor. I felt like I was timing labor contractions when I was on the flights. I breathed through the 2g phase like a contraction and reveled in the calm of 0g. Though when I finished my flight, I carried my research out in my arms. Our research was a different sort of baby. One that held answers to feed the future of humanity.
The Roots of Our Experiment
Our parabolic flight experiment came out of my friend Lucie's interest in how air flow over leaves might impact photosynthetic rate. She needed a planting box that would separate the roots from the shoots. And so her intern Mike started working on the problem and came up with our first prototype. Mike filed a New Technology Report with NASA.
I noticed how much cleaner the roots looked when we grew them in these boxes, and noted how much less water we lost. I approached our colleague Jacob about 3D printing a version of the hardware for me to use on the random positioning machines I was using to simulate microgravity for my microgreens. Jacob was my technical support through lots of experiments on these spinning machines. Our plants grew great!
Our mentors Gioia, Ye, and Ray encouraged us to develop the technology further. We thought about what might be needed to bump our microgreen growing hardware up through the NASA Tech Readiness Levels.
I started chatting with Jacob about 3D printing a cutting mechanism to go along with our boxes. Jacob modified our boxes with slide that went over the stems to cut them. We called it the Guillotine.
Then Larry came in with his idea of a twisting mechanism for cutting. He is a technical machinist so he made his out of a PVC pipe and acrylic panels that were precisely cut with a CNC machine. We called Larry's version the Pepper Grinder.
We decided to use scissors to trim our plants as our control. But at NASA even scissors weren't simple! We had to test many different kinds for sharpness and Larry rounded our scissor tips with a grinder so they were smooth and weren't likely to hurt anyone. We attached a ribbon as a tether so they wouldn't float away unexpectedly.
In talking with our colleagues Matt and Trent we realized that debris generation was the major challenge of harvesting these boxes in microgravity.
LaShelle Spencer came into the picture with mesh bags to cover the harvesting, with a draw string we could quickly pull to contain them and set them aside. LaShelle's designs moved forward!
Our virtual intern Chloe was a biologist who was a seamstress. She came in with an idea to attach the bag to scissors, and another virtual intern Ren worked with Chloe to take those sketches and draw them up digitally in CAD. Ren took Chloe's pattern and turned it into an engineering design to communicate that technology more completely with the rest of our team. We tested Chloe and Ren's design with bag attached to the scissors in the first flight, but they did not perform as well as the other options, so that technology did not move forward to the next flights.
Lucie knew that harvesting from these boxes would go well with a parabolic flight. We loved that idea. But it seemed impossible.
No one does these kinds of intense movements in a parabolic flight! Everyone just pushes a button or records their experiments. No one stands up in 2g, clears the area, and does a bunch of tasks in a parabolic flight - that would be madness!
Wait. Yes. Someone does. George does. And he trains his students to do it all the time! And he had something else we needed: a glovebox to work within.
So we practiced. A lot. Getting each movement completed within that 15 second window we knew we would have for microgravity. And soon it was time for our series of parabolic flights. What an adventure!
More about our Experiment Team
Lucie is an engineer from France who has been working with plant systems for most of her career. She flew science on parabolic flights in Europe before joining the Space Crop team at NASA for her Postdoctoral work.
LaShelle is a horticulturist at KSC. She has worked at KSC for a long time and really knows her way around controlled environment agriculture. She also plays the flute and piccolo!
Larry is a technician who makes things at KSC. Really awesome things. He also fixes everything he sees. He knows his way around engineering for space crops, and has been working in the plant group at Kennedy since the "Hanger L days".
Jacob is an engineer who loves 3D printing. He's also a farmer from New Mexico who initially joined the Space Crop team at KSC to share his expertise growing peppers for the PH-04 pepper experiment on the ISS. He worked there for 5 years, first as a student intern then as a contracted member of the NASA workforce. He has since moved back to New Mexico where he is pursuing his PhD at New Mexico State University in conjunction with the USDA extension office, while serving as a Mayordormo of the Acequias de los Herreras.
Christina is me! I was a postdoc at NASA KSC when I worked on this project. Now I'm a research associate with SyNRGE, LLC. I love growing plants in extreme environments, like space.
George is a professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine who specializes in heart surgery. He has developed tools for surgery in space. This project would not have been the same without the use of his glovebox.
Gioia is a senior scientist at NASA Kennedy Space Center. She leads the Space Crop Production team.
Ye leads the Microgravity Simulation Support Facility at NASA Kennedy Space Center.
Trent was head of the NASA Tech Transfer office at KSC and is now a strategic manager in the Exploration Research and Development at KSC.
Matt was an intern who moved up to a civil servant in the Space Crop Production team at KSC. He tragically passed away in a car collision when speeder hit him when they ran a red light. He was going into work after dropping his children off at school. His work lives on.
Ren was a virtual intern with the Microgravity Simulation Support Facility at KSC. She went on to work in Controlled Environment Agriculture to feed people here on Earth. She currently lives in Arizona and is applying for grad school.
Chloe was a virtual intern in Space Crop Production. She finished her degree in Plant Science at North Carolina State University.
Mike was an intern in Space Crop Production. He went on to work as a horticultural engineer for Interstellar Lab.
Ray has now retired, but he was a senior scientist at NASA KSC working with Space Crop Production.
We had a wonderful time working on this project. We moved our hardware designs up through the NASA Tech Readiness Levels. We'll see when they get a chance to fly in space, but for now it's incredible seeing all of the educational benefits that came from this technology development.
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