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Microgravity effects on leaf morphology, cell structure, carbon metabolism and mRNA expression of dwarf wheat

Metadata Updated: August 30, 2025

The PESTO experiment was launched on April 8, 2002 onboard STS-110 (Atlantis) and was returned on June 19, 2002 onboard STS-111 (Endeavor), a total of 73 days in space. The ground control was conducted on a 14-day delay, and was harvested on July 3, 2002. During this period there were a total of 7 harvests of PESTO wheat and priming of 6 wheat root modules on orbit. A total of 18 plants were fixed on orbit for morphological and structural analysis, 4 plants were fixed for RNA and molecular genetic analysis and greater than 150 plants were frozen for biochemical analysis. A total of 3018 images of wheat chambers were collected from the BPS cameras during flight, and 3,640 images were obtained from the ground controls. A total of 65 digital images of the wheat harvest were collected during flight, with 75 being collected from ground controls. In addition, crew members recorded approximately 50 images and over 3 hrs of video of flight operations. Over 2 gigabytes of environmental data were obtained from the flight and ground control units. A ground control experiment was conducted in the BPS ground control chamber in the Orbiter Environment Simulator (OES) at the Kennedy Space Center Launch Site Support Facility in Hangar L. The ground control was delayed by 14-days from the real- time flight operations in order to duplicate the flight operations as closely as possible in a 1 g environment. At launch, two chambers were dedicated to the PESTO study, which consisted of three growth cycles using Apogee wheat. The third chamber was dedicated to the TVT study for the first growth cycle and used Apogee wheat. For the subsequent two wheat growth cycles, the third chamber was used for the PESTO study. For the first growth cycle in all Plant Growth Chambers, seeds were germinated pre-launch. In PESTO, the ages of the plants were staggered at launch so that comparisons of physiological and biochemical properties between mature plants, which were well developed and photosynthetically competent, and young plants could be studied. In-flight, plants were harvested at a specific age, and the initiation of the next cycle of growth was staggered between the chambers

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025
Publisher Open Science Data Repository
Maintainer
Identifier 10.26030/m2eg-jx23
Data Last Modified 2025-08-21
Category Biological and Physical Sciences
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 61d41c7b-f5cf-493d-be2b-92d8480f3f36
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://osdr.nasa.gov/bio/repo/data/missions/STS-110
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash fa0136983b62d6a1eb7ce91cc868a90de537415418c2686bdd5c6a943b65ce65
Source Schema Version 1.1

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