NASA astronaut Frank Rubio checks tomato crops rising contained in the International Space Station for an area botany research.

Koichi Wakata/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/NASA

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Koichi Wakata/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/NASA

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio checks tomato crops rising contained in the International Space Station for an area botany research.

Koichi Wakata/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/NASA

It’s gotta be exhausting to lose one thing while you’re swirling across the Earth on the International Space Station — proper? Well, apparently not. A lacking tomato sparked a lighthearted thriller for the astronauts on board the ISS – and it is lastly been solved after months of accusations and intrigue.

What is probably going one of many first tomatoes ever harvested in house was plucked by astronaut Frank Rubio in March, shared in a put up on X (previously referred to as Twitter) by NASA. So when it is sensible that when it vanished, all finger pointing was directed at Rubio.

Rubio not too long ago made historical past for breaking the file of the longest spaceflight for a U.S. astronaut, spending 371 days in house. He returned to Earth on the finish of September and spoke at a NASA briefing in October, the place he addressed these tomato consuming allegations.

He defined that NASA is conducting botany research onboard the ISS so astronauts might determine methods to develop recent meals in house for long run missions.

“I put [the tomato] in a little bag, and one of my crewmates was doing [an] event with some schoolkids, and I thought it’d be kind of cool to show the kids, ‘Hey guys, this is the first tomato harvested in space,’ ” he mentioned. “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 estimated he spent between 8 and 20 hours of his personal time looking for the misplaced fruit. (Whether tomatoes are fruits or greens will depend on who you ask. In the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court got here down on the facet of greens — sort of.)

“I wanted to find it mostly so I could prove, like, ‘I did not eat the tomato,’ ” he mentioned, and defined he by no means discovered it. “A proud moment of harvesting the first tomato in space became a self-inflicted wound of losing the first tomato in space.”

Rubio mentioned he hoped somebody would discover it sooner or later — and that hope was lastly realized greater than eight months later.

“We might have found something that someone has been looking for for quite a while,” astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said in a NASA video talk from the ISS earlier this week.

“Our good friend Frank Rubio who headed home has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato — but we can exonerate him: We found the tomato.”

The crew laughed. No phrase on the place it was hiding or what it seemed like when it was found, although.

And now Frank Rubio walks the earth with a cleared identify.