Sealed canisters on tray F-2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
On October 19, 1983, the Rutgers California Supreme seeds were sealed into five aluminum canisters. Each held four layers of seeds in Dacron bags. Between the layers, little dosimeters kept count of the radiation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The canisters rode in tray F-2 of the Long Duration Exposure Facility, or LDEF. NASA’s summary report, SEEDS: A Celebration of Science<\/a>, describes the satellite as 30 feet (9.1 meters) long and about 11 tons (9,979 kilograms) in weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Challenger’s crew released LDEF on April 7, 1984, one day after launch on mission 41-C. The same flight carried a Tennessee student’s honeybee experiment<\/a>, which came home within a week.<\/p>\n\n\n NASA had planned to pick up the satellite in February 1985. Shuttle delays pushed the retrieval to September 1986. Then the Challenger accident grounded the fleet, as NASA’s history of mission STS-32<\/a> recounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the delays piled up, LDEF kept losing altitude. Trajectory specialists expected it to fall back into the atmosphere by March 1990. Columbia caught it on January 12, 1990, at 219 miles (342 kilometers) up, with astronaut Bonnie Dunbar on the robotic arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Engineers removed the first experiment tray from LDEF on February 23, 1990, and it was the SEEDS tray. A minivan drove it the next day to Park Seed in Greenwood, South Carolina. Staff opened a canister that evening, and germination tests were running by 9 p.m.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first kits left Greenwood on March 7, 1990. In total, more than 132,000 went to 64,000 teachers. They reached all 50 states, the District of Columbia and 30 other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A basic kit held two packets of 50 seeds. One came from space and one from Park’s climate-controlled warehouse, where the comparison seeds had waited for the same six years. Secondary kits split the space seeds into groups by canister layer, and college kits gave older students a separate packet from each of the four layers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About 77 percent of the data came from kindergarten through ninth grade. One elementary teacher liked that the project was real, since “not the teachers and not NASA knew the results!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Turlock, California, teacher Ken Selee’s classes threw a bacon, lettuce and space tomato sandwich party on July 5, 1990. He eventually served more than 2,500 space tomatoes, NASA reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early numbers favored the travelers. A 1992 NASA symposium paper<\/a> gave preliminary germination rates of 73.8 percent for space seeds and 70.3 percent for Earth seeds. The space seeds also sprouted a little faster, in 8.0 days on average against 8.3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the final report, plants were measured at 56 days. The faster early growth of the space group started to level off after four weeks. The summary report found no overall differences between the two kinds of plants or their fruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Students did report some odd plants, such as stunted ones and one that grew a leaf where a flower belonged. Radiation readings showed layer A of each canister absorbing about 725 rads and layer D about 350. Even so, this tomato variety is genetically quite stable, and some young researchers hoping for mutants were let down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soon after the kits went out, a newspaper article warned that the space plants might bear poisonous fruit. Tomatoes share a plant family with toxic nightshades. NASA’s summary judged the odds of such a mutation to be extremely remote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some superintendents and principals, worried about liability, discouraged the work or had the plants destroyed. A few teachers sent their kits back for fear of radioactivity. NASA’s own early tests had found no radioactivity in the seeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois, students tested extracts of the space fruit for toxic alkaloids. They got no reaction, while a sample of bittersweet nightshade turned orange-brown. One school fed space tomatoes to pigs, and one of those pigs later won Grand Champion at a hog show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim Alston, head of research at Park Seed, gave a simple warning: “A good scientist doesn’t eat the experiment.” According to NASA, many teachers and students ate the tomatoes anyway. One teacher planned to turn hers into jam for Christmas presents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doris Grigsby, of NASA’s Aerospace Education Services Program at Oklahoma State University, wrote the final report. She noted that novices produced most of the data. One teacher put it plainly: “Measurements were truly student done–with misunderstandings and errors no doubt abundant.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plants were overwatered, or left without light when schools shut off lights and heat outside class hours. Others were damaged while being measured, transplanted or moved. One secondary teacher wrote that six years of space radiation was “negligible when compared to the dangers of a small classroom where 100 students come and go and check and water plants.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n That makes the small germination edge hard to separate from classroom noise. Another teacher summed up the year: “We learned through the process that science is not easy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost half of the participants said they would keep growing second-generation plants. Some students even concluded that orbit could be a safe place to store seeds, an idea that today lives in seed banks on the ground<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final results were published in 1993 in NASA’s LDEF symposium proceedings<\/a>. How living things cope with radiation is still an open field, from fungi found at Chernobyl<\/a> to magnetic shields for astronauts<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: NASA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA tomato seeds, 12.5 million of them, went into orbit aboard the shuttle Challenger in April 1984. The trip was … <\/p>\n![\"LDEF](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/ldef-deployed-over-florida-1984.jpg\")
A one-year trip stretched to six<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
132,000 kits in the mail<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Faster sprouts, same tomatoes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Poisonous tomato fears<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data gathered by beginners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n