Astronauts Just Found a Tomato That Was Missing for 8 Months in Space

Everyone owes astronaut Frank Rubio an apology.

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) in late September, after a record-setting 371 straight days in space. During his lengthy mission, Rubio orbited our planet roughly 5,936 times, covered a distance of more than 157 million miles … and inadvertently lost one tiny tomato.

Rubio was among the ISS team who worked on a project called VEG-05, an experiment into how (or if) red robin tomatoes could grow in space. After a 100-day growth period, the inch-long tomatoes were harvested, but, according to NASA, the astronauts were allowed to examine them, but could not eat them due to the potential for fungal contamination. Rubio’s sample tomato somehow floated off in the low-gravity environment and wasn’t found before his year-plus mission ended.

However, after months of being teased about eating the missing tomato, Rubio’s name has finally been cleared.

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"We might have found something that someone had been looking for for quite a while," ISS astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said last week, during a Q&A with the crew still onboard. "Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home [in September], has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato. But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato."

Mogbeli did not reveal any additional details, like who found the tomato and where on the space station it was located, but still, the mystery is solved.

In October, Rubio told NASA that he harvested "the first tomato in space" and put it in a Ziploc bag. But when one of his fellow astronauts did an event with some schoolkids, he decided to take it from its storage place to show it off. "I thought it'd be kind of cool to show the kids," he said. "Then, I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it, and then I came back, and it was gone."

Rubio admitted that he spent "18 to 20 hours" looking for the tomato in the sprawling square footage of the ISS — which is roughly the size of a six-bedroom house. "Hopefully, somebody will find it someday, some little shriveled thing in a Ziploc bag, and they can prove the fact that I did not eat the tomato in space," he said.

Mission accomplished, Frank. 

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