Production, Nutritional and Organoleptic Analysis of Solanaceous Crops for Space

Missions beyond low-Earth orbit will encounter challenges in maintaining adequate nutrition and acceptability in the food system. In situ production of fresh produce can supplement nutrient deficiencies in the prepackaged diet. Several tomato and pepper varieties were evaluated with the goal of determining those with the best growth, nutrition, and organoleptic potential for use in a pick and eat salad crop production system. Cultivars of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum); �Red Robin�, �Sweet N Neat�, �Golden Heirloom�, �Ground Dew�, �Ground Jewel�, �Tomato 851� and cultivars of pepper (Capsicum annuum); �Numex Espa�ola Improved�, �Pompeii�, �Mohawk�, �Baby Bell�, �Big Jim Heritage� and �Bulgarian Carrot� were grown under 300 �mol m-1 s-1 PPFD from LED lights, 3000 ppm CO2, and 23�C to simulate an ISS environment. Nutritional analysis of all crops and sensory evaluation of tomato was conducted. �Bulgarian Carrot� was the hottest pepper at 8217 Scoville Heat Units, containing the highest amount of magnesium (0.042%), phosphorus (0.087%), potassium (0.619%), protein (3.94%) and Vitamin K1 (0.24�g/g). �Pompeii� had the highest Vitamin B1; 0.230 mg/100g. �Sweet N Neat� tomato had twice as much lycopene (92.5�g/g) than the all other red tomatoes and the highest amount of potassium (0.305%). �Ground Jewel� tomato had the highest Vitamin C content (25.6 mg/100g), however, several pepper varieties had significantly more; �Mohawk�, �Pompeii� and �Bulgarian Carrot contained 63.7, 46.2 and 41.9 mg/100g Vit. C, respectively. All six tomato cultivars received �passing� overall acceptability organoleptic scores with �Red Robin� tomato achieving the highest score (8.04). Several pepper varieties suffered from severe intumescence injury, therefore fruit production under these environmental conditions was limited, and insufficient for organoleptic testing. These baseline data are essential to selecting crops for future missions and assessing the impacts of new crop production hardware and changes in environmental conditions on future crop performance and nutritional quality.