Photo:NASA via Getty
NASA via Getty
The mystery of the lost space tomato has been solved.
Astronauts aboard theInternational Space Station(ISS) revealed in alivestreamWednesday celebrating the space station’s 25th anniversary that they finally found the missing fruit after initially blaming fellow astronautFrank Rubiofor its disappearance.
NASA’s Associate Administrator Bob Cabana asked the crew near the end of the broadcast if they “hid anything” or “lost anything” that they were still looking for, to which several of the astronauts laughed.
“Well, we might have found something that someone had been looking for quite a while,” NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said with a smile on her face.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), gestures prior the launch of Soyuz MS-22 space ship, at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022.Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo
Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo
She continued, “Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home, has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato. But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato.”
According toSpace.com, the mystery of the lost tomato had been a months-long inside joke between astronauts on the ISS, which started after Rubio harvested Red Robin dwarf tomatoes for the space station’sVeg-05 experiment.
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The NASA astronaut reportedly first discussed the missing tomato during a livestream call on NASA Television, where he noted that he “spent so many hours looking for that thing,” but ultimately came up empty-handed.
“I’m sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future,” Rubio said, per Space.com.
He again mentioned the lost tomato in a news conference held after returning to earth after more than a year in space. He said, per the outlet, that he had spent “18–20 hours of my own time” looking for the missing tomato, but it was never discovered.
“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 said with a laugh. “Hopefully somebody will find it someday: a little, shriveled thing.”
During the ISS crew’s 25th anniversary stream, they noted that they all have “on multiple occasions lost items” in the space station.
“Luckily most of them we found again near an air vent, maybe a couple minutes, maybe a couple hours later. But it is certainly one of the challenges that you really get to learn to cope with until you get here,” one of the astronauts said.
source: people.com
