Lost and found: Astronauts find tomato missing for months inside space station
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Dr Francisco Rubio with some tomato plants that were grown inside the International Space Station in October 2022.
PHOTO: NASA/FACEBOOK
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A space mystery involving a missing tomato has been solved after several months.
It happened at the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the Earth at an altitude of approximately 402km.
In March 2023, American astronaut Francisco Rubio misplaced his 2.5cm Red Robin dwarf tomato harvested at the ISS.
It was the final harvest for a Veg-05 experiment, which was a project that Dr Rubio had worked on. Some colleagues thought he might have eaten the fruit.
The astronaut said he had placed the tomato in a little bag. “I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it… and then I came back and it was gone,” Dr Rubio was quoted as saying at an October media event, according to a Dec 8 CNN report.
The ISS was described as bigger than a six-bedroom house, and searching for a tiny red ball might have been challenging.
Dr Rubio said he spent many hours hunting for the tomato.
And after 371 days away from Earth, he returned to the planet in September, unable to locate his elusive tomato. His journey was the longest single spaceflight for an American astronaut, said The New York Times.
“I’m sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future,” Dr Rubio was quoted as saying during an ISS live-stream in September, as reported by media publication Space.
After Dr Rubio’s departure from the ISS, the “wanted” tomato decided to show up.
In an ISS live-streamed event on Dec 6, astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said: “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.”
The state of the recovered tomato was not mentioned.
