“The earth laughs in flowers,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature and Selected Essays.
We, humans, spend our entire lives blistering through space on a giant rock we call Earth with flowers in abundance. It is fascinating to know that we too can pollinate the cosmos.
NASA astronaut and American engineer Scott Kelly captured the Orange Zinnia, enjoying the sunshine aboard the International Space Station in 2016.
The harvest was part of the VEG-01 experiment during Expedition 46. Nasa used the seeds from growing pillows — watered via injected syringes — delivered on ISS Cargo to foster the Zinnia flowers.
Plant research in space originally began in the 1970s to understand how plants grow in microgravity and to explore the possibility of autonomous gardening on deep space missions.
See more of Kelly’s beautiful pictures after the jump.
