In March, astronaut Frank Rubio harvested one of the most important tomatoes in history. The tomato was one of the first grown in space, aboard the International Space Station, as part of an experiment to develop "a continuous fresh-food production system" for offworld life. Not long after Rubio picked the tomato, he, ummmm, misplaced it.
"I put [the tomato] in a little bag, and one of my crewmates was doing [an] event with some schoolkids, and I thought it'd be kind of cool to show the kids, 'Hey guys, this is the first tomato harvested in space,' " Rubio said recently after returning from his record-breaking 371 days in space. "Then, I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it, and then I came back and it was gone."
Rubio said he spent 8 to 20 hours searching for it but to no avail.
"I wanted to find it mostly so I could prove, like, 'I did not eat the tomato,'" he said.
Finally, astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, currently aboard the ISS, shared some good news this week.
"We might have found something that someone has been looking for for quite a while," she 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."
Where the tomato was hiding was not revealed.
(via NPR)
