Botany Professor Simon Gilroy has been appointed to the steering committee of the Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Science in Space.
The survey has been organized by the National Research Council (NRC) at the request of NASA and in response to Congressional legislation. Its objective is to set clear priorities for microgravity research for the coming decade, incorporating numerous biological, physical and engineering disciplines.
The decadal survey will involve the entire U.S. microgravity and space exploration community and is being led by a steering committee and seven survey panels.
Gilroy, a cell biologist, brings with him great expertise on how plants respond to gravity and indeed, NASA has a long history of researching plant behaviours in the weightless environment of space.
These studies have been partly to help in our understanding of how plants on Earth can sense the direction of gravity and use this information to control the development of the amazingly complex shapes of the root and shoot systems we see all around us.
However, NASA-supported research has also been aimed towards investigating the use of plants to regenerate the air and water in a spacecraft and to produce enough food to sustain astronauts as they travel deeper and deeper into space, just as plants do for us every day on terra firma.