Tomato that was lost in space for 8 months found by ISS astronauts

The mystery of the missing red fruit in space has been solved!

Back in March of this year, a miniature tomato disappeared after an off-Earth harvest.

What was seen as a minor incident - on the grand scale of space missions - turned into a huge inside joke amongst the space crew.

For the eight months the tomato was missing, all fingers pointed at NASA astronaut - Frank Rubio - for eating the tomato.

Luckily for Rubio, the tomato showed up eight months later on the International Space Station (ISS), and he has been freed of his fellow astronauts' suspicions.

sololos/Getty / NASA

On ISS' 25th anniversary, NASA astronaut - Jasmin Moghbeli - cleared Rubio's name, stating: '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.'

Measuring only 1-inch-wide (2.5 cm), the red dwarf tomato was part of the 'final harvest for the Veg-05 experiment' tended to by Rubio.

After the March 29 2023 harvest, Rubio dispersed samples to each ISS astronaut in Ziploc bags. Unfortunately, Rubio's portion floated away before he could take a bite.

'I spent so many hours looking for that thing - 18 to 20 hours of my own time.

'I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future,' Rubio joked during his first mention of the missing fruit.

For eight months, Frank Rubio was accused by his fellow astronauts of eating the lost tomato / sololos /Getty / NASA

In Rubio's defence, the ISS is bigger than a six-bedroom house and things can very easily float away due to microgravity changes. And in a station with over 25 years of stuff, things can easily get misplaced.

Rubio believed with the humidity being 17%, the tomato 'probably desiccated' and 'somebody just threw away the bag'.

The floating tomato mystery opened up doors to for the astronauts to explore unexpected situations when growing fruit and vegetables beyond Earth's surface.

On the bright side, the humour of the situation may have unexpectedly brought some light to the darker times that were happening at the time. When the mystery was still ongoing to be solved, Rubio shared the difficulty of being away from his wife and children for extended periods of time.

This is not the first time things have gone missing in orbit. Just last month, a toolbox went missing during a ISS spacewalk, and another astronaut lost a bag worth $100,000 in 2008 while trying to clean up a leak. Maybe being accused of eating a tomato isn't the worst thing in the world!