Botany and Biology Analysis Wrap Up Week as Dragon Preps for Earth Return

House agriculture, stem cells, and cargo operations wrapped up the week aboard the Worldwide House Station. The Expedition 74 crew additionally carried out blood checks and put in a brand new meals processor as a U.S. cargo spacecraft nears the tip of its mission.

Launching a spacecraft on Earth full of sufficient meals for a yearslong crew mission or sending resupply ships to replenish a crew past low Earth orbit is prohibitive. Subsequently, rising vegetation aboard a spacecraft is essential to sustaining crews on long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and past. Consequently, NASA and its worldwide companions have been exploring rising crops in area to allow crews to feed themselves with out assist from Earth. NASA flight engineer Chris Williams contributed to the continued area agriculture analysis on the finish of the week and configured a microscope to look at plant cell division in microgravity. Insights might result in improved strategies of rising meals in area in addition to on lunar and planetary surfaces.

Low Earth orbit may additionally be the following frontier for biomedical manufacturing as docs search to beat the constraints of gravity on the bottom. NASA flight engineer Jessica Meir harvested blood stem cells contained in the Kibo laboratory module’s Life Science Glovebox (LSG) which have been rising aboard the orbital outpost because the arrival of a SpaceX Dragon cargo craft on Might 17. Subsequent, she appeared on the density and viability of the dwell cells utilizing the KERMIT fluorescent microscope. Researchers are exploring space-designed cell therapies to deal with severe medical circumstances comparable to blood cancers and immune ailments.

Dragon is because of depart the Worldwide House Station at 12:05 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, June 16, to return the stem cell samples, together with a number of tons of accomplished science experiments and lab {hardware}, for evaluation on Earth. Dwell protection of Dragon’s undocking and departure begins at 11:45 a.m. on NASA+.

Williams and Meir additionally partnered with flight engineers Jack Hathaway of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European House Company) packing Dragon with return cargo collectively all through Friday. The quartet will intensify their cargo transfers early subsequent week after they start loading Dragon with delicate analysis samples packed inside transportable science freezers for preservation, retrieval, and evaluation on Earth.

Williams and Meir started their Friday shift accumulating blood samples for spinning in a centrifuge then stowing in a science freezer for future evaluation. Hathaway eliminated a analysis freezer from inside Kibo’s Life Science Glovebox used the day earlier than to protect micro organism samples for genetic and chemical evaluation. Adenot additionally spent a while helping Meir in the course of the stem cell operations then examined a brand new meals processor within the Columbus laboratory module by cooking a Mediterranean dish.

The station’s three cosmonauts, station commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineers Sergei Mikaev and Andrey Fedyaev loved an off-duty day on Friday.

Study extra about station actions by following the area station weblog, @space_stationon X, in addition to the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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June 12, 2026 1:10PM