Rubio noted that he spent between eight and 20 hours of his free time searching for the tomato. “Unfortunately, human nature is such that a lot of people say, ‘He must have eaten a tomato.’ And I wanted to find it mainly to prove that I didn’t eat a tomato.” However, the astronaut never managed to find it – Rubio returned to Earth on 27 September.
During a press conference on Wednesday, astronauts remaining on the space station said they had finally located the missing tomato. Rubio’s colleagues did not reveal where the tomato had been all along, nor did they specify what condition they found it in. In October, Rubio suggested that due to the high humidity on the station, it had probably already rotted or “dried out to the point where you can’t figure out what it is.”
Earlier it was reported that on 29 November at about 14:02 Moscow time Russian ship Progress MS-23 entered the dense layers of the atmosphere and burned to the ground there in front of the astronauts. Part of the elements of the lorry fell down in a non-navigable area of the Pacific Ocean.
