NASA announced Wednesday that they finally found a tomato which went missing more than eight months ago on the International Space Station (ISS).
“Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home [already], has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato. But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato,” NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli old a livestream audience on Wednesday, according to Live Science. The tomato was part of an off-Earth harvest as part of the Veg-05 experiment, which seeks to grow veggies and fruit in space — since tomatoes are a fruit, NASA, in case you forgot.
NASA astronauts finally find 1-inch tomato that was ‘lost in space’ for 8 months https://t.co/KqsZ14WTMz
— Live Science (@LiveScience) December 8, 2023
Apparently, the tomato disappeared after each ISS astronaut was given a ziplock bag of tomatoes on March 29, 2023, from one of the Veg-05 harvests. Rubio’s bag floated away before he could take a bite. “I spent so many hours looking for that thing,” Rubio joked back in September, Live Science noted. “I’m sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future.” (RELATED: Former NASA Chief Says UFOs Could Be ‘Unfriendly’ Chinese Tech)
The ISS is about the same size as a six-bedroom house, hence why it was so easy for the fruit to float off into the abyss. But still, losing and then rediscovering a piece of fruit in space was not on my 2023 bingo card, but here we are.