Astronaut Anne McClain Conducts Offworld Space Botany Research

Anne McClain: How does space radiation affect plants? NASA’s Advanced Plant EXperiment-12 (APEX-12) seeks to find out.

Flown up on SpaceX-32 last week, I installed a series of petri dishes with thale cress plants into our VEGGIE facility today. Over the next seven days, these cress plants will grow in our unique microgravity environment, then will be placed in cold stowage and returned home.

There, scientists will be able to look at how radiation may have impacted the genome and telomere activity. Telomeres are protectors of chromosomes, and are a marker of a plant’s survivability. This experiment will tell us a lot about how to equip plants for the stress of longer duration missions.

In the first photo, I am setting up the facility in one of the NASA EXPRESS racks. In the second photo, I am testing the light type and intensity inside the facility to ensure the plants are in a controlled environment.

Astrobiology