5 cool science experiments, from space

Growing lettuce, taming fire, chilling atoms to the coldest point in the universe and hunting for invisible matter…  The International Space Station is home to some of the weirdest and most important experiments ever run. Here are six of our favorites.

Space salad

Yep. We can grow food in space! The Vegetable Production System, also known as the Veggie mission, is the space garden where it happens.

NASA hopes it can help them study plant growth in microgravity, while “adding fresh food to the astronauts’ diet and enhancing happiness and well-being on the orbiting laboratory.”

(MORE: NASA fast-tracks its plans for a moon base with 3 launches in 2026)

Most astronaut food is in the form of freeze-dried and prepackaged meals. The challenges in growing fresh produce are a closed environment without sunlight or Earth’s gravity. What sustains the plants are the “pillows” they grow in, filled with a clay-based growth media and fertilizer.

“We already know from our pioneering astronauts that fresh flowers and gardens on the International Space Station create a beautiful atmosphere and let us take a little piece of Earth with us on our journeys,” NASA says.

Fire spheres

Flames, just like almost anything, behave differently in space. The tapered point of a candle flame turns into a round sphere, for example.

And flames that burn at extremely low temperatures, known as cool flames, are nearly impossible to create in Earth’s gravity.

In this combustion experiment, scientists dropped a blazing hot fire sphere into total darkness, yet it continued to burn invisibly at a low temperature.

Now, car and aircraft engine manufacturers use this data to design hyper-efficient, low-emission engines.

Slimy green goo

While this experiment is fun, it’s not all games. It’s actually a fascinatingly unique opportunity to research physics, more specifically, examining liquid behavior in microgravity.

For anyone who grew up watching Nickelodeon, this is quite literally their slime sent directly from Earth to the International Space Station.

Since slime has a different viscosity than water, but is still a liquid, astroanuts got to play with it, creating bubbles, trying to cut it, putting it on a paddleboard and more — all while conducting original research. 

Creating the coldest known spot in the universe

The Cold Atom Lab is a facility for the study of ultra-cold quantum gases for quantum physics research.

It uses lasers and magnetic fields to chill clouds of atoms down to less than a degree above absolute zero. These clouds can then form a fifth state of matter — outside of gases, liquids, solids and plasmas — called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC).

(MORE: NASA spacecraft snaps stunning Mars views during flyby)

This experiment set a record for creating the coldest known spot in the universe.

Twin study

NASA sent one twin, Scott Kelly, into orbit in space on a year-long mission, while the other twin, Mark Kelly, stayed here on Earth. Both are now retired astronauts.

From this, dubbed the Twin Study, they were able to look at what physiological, molecular and cognitive changes could happen to a human from exposure to spaceflight.

Ultimately, while some changes were observed in the space twin throughout the course of the study, researchers found that many of these returned to preflight levels by the study’s end. This exhibited the resilience of the human body to adapt to extreme environments.

The invisible universe: dark matter, antimatter and missing matter

This sounds like a line straight out of science fiction: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), a 15,000-pound particle physics detector, is parsing through hundreds of billions of cosmic rays.

It is humanity’s primary instrument for searching for and exploring the unknown: dark matter, antimatter and missing matter.

The hope is that it can expand our knowledge of the universe and provide a clearer understanding of its origins.

Content writer Ada Wood enjoys exploring the stories that science and climate teach us about our natural world and how it influences the way we live in it.