Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has ended the year 2024 by launching the crucial SpaDeX Mission to become the fourth country in the world to bring together and join two aircraft in space. The mission majorly known for its docking objective, carried spinach into space to study the possibility of food and nutrition for astronauts in space.
On Monday, ISRO launched two small spacecraft by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. As India aims to leave a mark in the world through its space exploration missions, this expedition will help India’s space ambitions such as ‘Indian on Moon’, sample return from the Moon and the building and operation of Bharatiya Antariksh Station- India’s very own space station.
While the primary objective of the SpaDeX mission is to work on the technology for docking and undocking of aircraft in a low-Earth circuit orbit, it has also carried biological payload for the first time on orbit. Under this objective, scientists have chosen ‘Spinacia Oleracea’, commonly known as spinach, to be taken into space and study the possibility of food and nutrition during future space missions.
The first biological payload to be put on orbit has been designed by Amity University’s Center for Excellence in Astrobiology and will be monitored real-time by Amity University Mumbai through its special Amity Plant Experimental Module in Space (APEMS). Since plants are very sensitive to environmental stimuli like light, temperature, nutritional conditions, and gravity, APEMS will use the monitoring information to study the effects of lack of light and gravity on the plant.
The information obtained from this experiment under APEMS will provide an understanding how higher plants sense the direction of gravity and light and improve itself to respond to gravitational stress and regulate their direction of growth. The significance of studying the callus is that it can differentiate into shoots, roots, or a whole plant through addition of a specific set of phytohormones, chemical messengers that regulate plant growth.
According to scientists, the advantage of using Spinach callus is that it is a fast growing plant which will help to easily measure its growth rate and the changes in its green color will help to capture the growth and death of the plant through the in-built camera. Along with monitoring the growth of plant callus, Amity University Mumbai will also conduct parallel experiments to learn the difference in plant growing in space and the university’s laboratory.
Dr W Selvamurthy, former DRDO scientist and Director General for Amity Directorate of Science and Innovation, said, “While we are planning to put humans to space, we will also need to give them fresh food for their satisfaction and to meet their nutrional requirements. Through this plant callus, we will get to know how plants behave in a microgravity environment and what challenges are faced to grow vegetables in space.”
