CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Freshly-baked bread on the dinner menu of the International Space Station may not be far away if an experiment launched aboard shuttle Atlantis on Thursday bears fruit.

STS-110

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The Photosynthesis Experiment and System Testing and Operation, referred to by its gastronomically-correct acronym PESTO, is to provide NASA scientists with a detailed look at how wheat growth is affected by long-term exposure to micro-gravity conditions.

"Plants are a crucial part of the ecological system that supports human life," said David Cox, NASA project manager for the PESTO experiments. "This research will provide important knowledge necessary for future interplanetary travel as well as provide additional insight into crop growth here on Earth."

Wheat plants grown in space will be compared to like plants grown on Earth to evaluate any differences in the rate of development or unusual behavior.

Atlantis will carry the PESTO experiment up to the Destiny science laboratory as part of the STS-110 flight -- a station construction mission that will also deliver two major new components of the space station.

PESTO will be conducted inside a self-contained plant habitat, named the Biomass Production System (BPS), which duplicates conditions required for plant growth.

The BPS provides a temperature and humidity-controlled growing environment, plus a system to deliver nutrients to plants and botanical experiments, to enable experiments in micro-gravity for periods of 90 days or longer.

The BPS habitat will be transferred from Atlantis into the frontier outpost for an expected two-month stay. Then the wheat plants grown during the experiment will be returned to Earth by the next shuttle mission scheduled for a late May launch.

Both wheat seeds and living plants will be used during the experiment.

Sixty-four sprouting wheat plants -- half of them 12 days old on launch day, the remainder eight days old -- will be monitored to determine if they produce oxygen and purify water at the same rates as plants growing on Earth.

Wheat seeds also will be germinated at three different times during their space station stay and the resulting plants will be harvested upon their return to Earth to find out if their growth was affected by their stay in space.

The wheat plants will be scrutinized and measured in a manner somewhat similar to how car engines are tested for horsepower and fuel economy, Cox said.

While not the first plants grown in space -- plant growth experiments were conducted on America's Skylab and Russia's Mir space stations and earlier space shuttle missions -- PESTO's wheat plants will be the first grown under well-controlled conditions for such a long duration in micro-gravity.

Officials with NASA and its life sciences contractor, Dynamac Corp., believe that the PESTO results will have important implications for future long-duration spaceflights and plan additional experiments on upcoming space station missions.