The space trees have landed
It's not exactly Day of the Triffids but an arboreal moment of some significance, nonetheless.
The shuttle Endeavour's return to Earth on Monday (GMT) brought with it the first trees grown on the International Space Station (ISS).
The weeping willows were a Canadian-led experiment to try to understand what makes wood.
If you're wondering how they managed to fit trees inside the orbiter for the journey home, these were of course just willow shoots - not the full-grown thing.
The plants (Salix babylonica) were cultivated with the assistance of the Advanced Biological Research System. This is a large experimental box on the ISS that can carefully control temperature, illumination, and atmospheric composition.
The ABSR will house many of the plant studies on the ISS in the years ahead, and also experiments with arthropods. It's where space spiders and crickets will spend their time on orbit.
The willow experiment was initiated by Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk during his long stay on the station.
The idea was very simple: Thirsk and colleagues were asked by Rodney Savidge from the University of New Brunswick to make small loops in the willow shoots, and then just leave them be.
But that simple action of bending the shoots to form circles will have triggered the formation of new wood, what plant biologists call "reaction wood". It has been hypothesised that reaction wood is heavily influenced by gravity.
Microscope view of reaction wood fibres following looping (Red line zone)
And, of course, the only place you can go to test that hypothesis is to the ISS where the constant conditions of free fall mean that any changes you witness in a process or system have to be the consequence of "removing gravity" - all other conditions being equal.
The formation of reaction wood in willows on Earth is very well understood, and scientists will be able to see very quickly under the microscope how that process differs for their returned space trees.
The ISS is going to host many plant experiments during its lifetime. These studies will address quite fundamental questions in biology, but they will also have clear commercial applications as well.
Dr Perry Johnson-Green, senior programme scientist for life and physical sciences at the Canadian Space Agency, told me:
"The biologist who's actually running the willow experiment has two hats. One of his hats is as a fundamental biologist who 'wants to know', based on his own curiosity and the curiosity of the scientific community - why it is that wood forms the way it does? Now, his other hat is that he's part of a forestry department. He knows that reaction wood is very important to the pulp and paper industry because it's 'good wood'; and it's very bad to the timber industry because it has the knots that people are familiar with."
We can all have a good pub argument about the value of spending so many billions of dollars to build an orbiting laboratory, but the ISS is now there and virtually complete. In science terms, just a few racks - lab benches, if you like - have yet to arrive on station.
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President Obama has taken the view that the ISS should now maximise the return on investment and has requested the funds from Congress to run the platform beyond its current termination date of 2016 to at least 2020.
That decision is an important one for utilisation and for science, because it was becoming clear that the uncertainty over the station's future was actually holding back many scientists from coming forward to propose experiments - particularly scientists in the commercial sector.
Many took the view that it was not worthwhile designing expensive experimental payloads if the equipment could be used only for a few years before being dumped in the Pacific Ocean with a de-orbited ISS.
Certainty about utilisation should persuade many more minds that microgravity research on the ISS is something to get involved in.
The lab workers - the astronauts - also have more time to do science now. For one thing, there are more of them (a maximum of six individuals on station at any one time); but with assembly almost done, they can also raise science duty from the recent 20 hours a week to something more like 70 hours a week.
When I spoke recently to Julie Robinson, the ISS programme scientist at Nasa's Johnson Space Center, she said she expected research to start to really ramp up in the coming months:
"If you take just raw numbers of investigations - two years ago, we were doing about 30 investigations every six months. Now, we're doing well over 100 every six months. And we expect that our throughput - how rapidly those experiments get completed and we move on to the next one - is also going to go up significantly. We're anticipating that if you don't count the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, we'll be serving between 400 and 600 scientists every six months."
I'll talk more of the AMS in the coming months. It's been described as the single most expensive space science experiment ever developed.
The spectrometer has arrived at Esa's technical centre in Noordwijk for final testing and is due for launch on the penultimate shuttle flight.
Watch this space.
I’m 
© 2012~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~44~RS~)
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What annoys me is that people still talk of the ISS as having a limited lifetime which must come to an end at some point, whether 2015, 2020 or 2025.
Let me explain. The ISS is a modular construction, assembled over a period of years. A modular construction need never be abandoned or lost, providing that its modules are regularly replaced. Assuming similar operational lifetimes, then, the Zarya and Zvezda modules will come due for replacement a decade before Columbus and Kibo. A well designed station would simply replace old modules with new ones on a regular schedule, without any fuss, and without any interruption to its operation.
The trouble is, the space agencies are simply not thinking like that. They're not trying to build a sustainable human presence in space, they're only interested in running missions which siphon funds out of the taxpayers' pockets into their own.
I would have thought it was the job of a president to see a bit further than this, and maybe Obama can. The ISS should be regarded as a permanent installation, to be regularly maintained as such. The major obstacle to doing this is of course the cost of access. NASA has shown itself unable to bring down the cost, which is why turning to the private sector for new ideas and better focused motivation is so important.
Assuming that our civilisation continues to grow, then activities in space will also expand, and the volume and usage of space stations in low Earth orbit will also grow. In this context, to talk of the ISS coming to the end of its "mission" and being destroyed with no replacement is nonsense. When will Cern or the Hawaiian observatories come to the end of their "mission"? When we know all there is to know about particle physics and astronomy?
Clearly we still have much to learn about life in space. How can we grow food crops in space to support space travellers? What are the countermeasures against the physiological problems of living in weightlessness? The ISS will be needed at least until these problems are fully answered -- and who knows when that will be?
Stephen
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But... we have no way of knowing how these space trees may differ from the trees of Earth. Are they benign... or not???
If we bring them back to our biosphere and let them grow here - and spread their ALIEN SEED - what guarantee do we have that they will not INFECT the trees of earth with their space-bred otherness?
The scientists of earth have received warnings about this: but they did not listen. Very well. The stage is set.
Now - let the drama... commence!
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Surely we shouldn't avoid astronauts on the basis that they have been in outer space and thus have become contaminated... I'd say the same applies to these willow shoots. They are not "space trees" with "alien seed" - they are willow shoots that were sent up from Earth and then returned here. Not to mention the fact that they'll likely be confined to the lab anyway.
It is an interesting experiment - simple, yet hopefully able to provide new insight into the way plants develop. We can only wish for many more experiments to follow so that the ISS is put to good use.
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@Stephen: I sense the desire to keep the ISS orbiting for as long as possible, potentially through a process of renewal. Of course, the core systems and modules will have to be certified, but if you speak to engineers today they say some of the existing elements are well capable of going deep into the 2020s. The Russians, we know, have already been in this thinking mode. And Western space station managers have also talked about "growth potential". The Node 3 just launched would still be capable of hosting a CRV-type vehicle were one to be developed and visit the ISS in the next few years.
And on the subject of space plants, my colleague Richard Black has reminded me of the Apollo Moon trees.
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Jonathan, thanks, that's good to know. Clearly our gradual expansion into the universe is turning out to be very much a haphazard evolutionary process (like our evolution of intelligence some 2.5 million years ago), rather than a logical, planned progression, masterminded by any space agency.
Interesting article about the Moon trees. How long till we have trees growing on Earth from seeds brought back from trees which grew from seed on the Moon itself?!
Stephen
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"The ISS is a modular construction, assembled over a period of years. A modular construction need never be abandoned or lost, providing that its modules are regularly replaced."
Stephen: Most crucial modules of the ISS can not be replaced because they are connected at multiple ends. Any attempt to replace Zarya or a US laboratory would require to disassemble the entire station. To make matters worse, none of the modules, for the exception of the Russian service module, are capable of independent flight. To implement your idea a new architecture would be required like the one Russians proposed under the OPSEK project:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/opsek.html
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Anatoly, thanks. It is precisely this issue which makes me want to tear my hair out! Mir could have been maintained indefinitely as I suggest (even replacing the base block wouldn't have been a problem, I believe). A station consisting of two Skylabs docked end to end (which could have been in operation before 1980) could also have been maintained. But no, America had to spend tens of billions of dollars over two decades to develop a station in which long-term maintenance seems to have been designed out of it from the start -- and of course its short-term maintenance was crippled from the outset by the high cost of access, which was unfortunately not solved by the Shuttle (though reducing the cost of access to orbit by an order of magnitude was the Shuttle's original selling-point).
So now we have Simonetta di Pippo proudly saying the ISS is "a permanent base in low Earth orbit", a "permanently inhabited observation platform" and has given so far "10 years of permanent human presence in space" (she uses the word "permanent(ly)" three times in this announcement) for something which is not permanent at all, but designed on the old paradigm of missions which leave no infrastructure behind them but are totally lost at the end of their operational lifetime.
http://www.iss2010symposium.com/mailing/19-21_04_2010/mailing_04_2010_online.html
It is my view that we will get nowhere in space until we stop thinking in terms of missions and start thinking in terms of services and permanent infrastructure. Meaning the long-term maintainability of space stations should be designed into them from the outset (as well as, obviously, the reusability of transport vehicles).
Stephen
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What annoys me is that people still talk of the ISS as having a limited lifetime which must come to an end at some point, whether 2015, 2020 or 2025.
Let me explain. The ISS is a modular construction, assembled over a period of years. A modular construction need never be abandoned or lost, providing that its modules are regularly replaced. Assuming similar operational lifetimes, then, the Zarya and Zvezda modules will come due for replacement a decade before Columbus and Kibo. A well designed station would simply replace old modules with new ones on a regular schedule, without any fuss, and without any interruption to its operation.
The trouble is, the space agencies are simply not thinking like that. They're not trying to build a sustainable human presence in space, they're only interested in running missions which siphon funds out of the taxpayers' pockets into their own.
I would have thought it was the job of a president to see a bit further than this, and maybe Obama can. The ISS should be regarded as a permanent installation, to be regularly maintained as such. The major obstacle to doing this is of course the cost of access. NASA has shown itself unable to bring down the cost, which is why turning to the private sector for new ideas and better focused motivation is so important.
Assuming that our civilisation continues to grow, then activities in space will also expand, and the volume and usage of space stations in low Earth orbit will also grow. In this context, to talk of the ISS coming to the end of its "mission" and being destroyed with no replacement is nonsense. When will Cern or the Hawaiian observatories come to the end of their "mission"? When we know all there is to know about particle physics and astronomy?
Clearly we still have much to learn about life in space. How can we grow food crops in space to support space travellers? What are the countermeasures against the physiological problems of living in weightlessness? The ISS will be needed at least until these problems are fully answered -- and who knows when that will be?
Best regards, Yuriy, CEO of youtube downloader
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