For the last eight months, unbeknownst to most of the world, a massive scandal in the space community has been brewing. A tomato, grown as part of NASA’s VEG-05 challenge to cultivate food in a zero-gravity environment, went missing. The resulting witch hunt accused astronaut Frank Rubio of having eaten the tomato under his care. Despite steadfast denial that he’d consumed the multi-million dollar experimental tomato, his fellow crew members aboard the International Space Station remained confident that he’d done so, even after Rubio’s departure from the station. On Wednesday, the team announced in a livestream interview that the missing tomato had been discovered still aboard.
“Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home, has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato,” NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said during Wednesday’s livestream. “But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato.”
The red robin dwarf tomato was grown in an effort to study the effect that space has on plant food, including growth tendencies, nutrient composition, microbial safety, and flavor. There was an additional side-benefit to growing the plants, as it improved psychological effects of space for the crew onboard. The program has successfully grown lettuce, cabbage, mustard, kale, and zinnia flowers, according to NASA.
Because of the low sample size and concerns about fungal contamination in space, the astronauts were expressly informed not to eat the vegetables grown onboard the ISS. Following the harvest, each astronaut was given a ziploc bag with tomatoes inside, like the one shown below, held by UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi. At some point Rubio’s tomato bag went floating away and lodged somewhere in the station.
“I did not eat the tomato, and I wish I had at this point because I think everybody thinks I did,” Rubio said in an interview a couple of months before the tomato was discovered. “I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I’m sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future,” he added.
Vindicated he is! Wow, egg on your face much, ISS crew? Boo, tomato tomato!