Sounding Rockets for Gravitational Research on Plants: A Systematic Review
摘要
The ability of plants to adapt and grow in extraterrestrial environments is a crucial prerequisite for human spatial colonization of extraterrestrial environments. Sounding rockets allow biological payloads to experience real microgravity conditions for several minutes before returning to Earth. The present systematic review sought to gain new insights to guide the design of plant experiments for sounding rocket platforms. Most of the plant studies using sounding rocket technology have been conducted by Germany (Ten out of twelve launches). In the launches conducted, the minimum apogee was 86 km, and the maximum was 800 km for the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 and MAXUS, respectively. The microgravity quality was in the range of 10− 4 g to 10− 6 g. The plant payloads selected for the launches ranged from plant cells to young seedlings. Four (4) out of 10 studies deploy hardware capable of automatically fixing the plant material in different gravitational phases. All ten studies included 1 g ground controls in parallel with the flown samples. Two of the ten studies utilized another real microgravity platform in addition to 1 g ground controls, conducted in parallel with the sounding rocket flight. The biological responses to sounding rocket flight have been investigated at cellular, molecular, histological, and physiological levels. Sounding rockets and suborbital spacecraft, even though they have some limitations, can still be good options for plant biology researchers. They offer a way to do repeated observations and experiments in real microgravity conditions.