Thale Cress Greenhouse Photo Credit/ESA
School children seem a natural mix, when it comes to growing plants in space.
The European Space Agency plans to make a little hay of its own with the pairing when Italian Paulo Naspoli heads for the International Space Station in mid-December.
Students from 12 to 14-years-old across Europe will have an opportunity to follow along and participate in a new Greenhouse in Space experiment. The research is fundamental to future plans to launch human explorers on long duration deep space missions.
Plants add not only variety to the diet of astronauts, but important nutrients and potentially a means of replacing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with oxygen. Astronauts also report the experience of caring for plants while in space can be a satisfying reminder of life on Earth.
Scientists though are still investigating which varieties cope with the weightlessness and artificial light needed to grow away from the Earth.
Working with a small greenhouse in the European Space Agency’s Columbus module, Naspoli will cultivate, observe and videotape the life cycle of Thale Cress, a flowering plant.
Students across Europe will have the opportunity to grow Thale Cress of their own and document the development. The observation period will last about 10 weeks.
NASA’s own experience with student experiments with plants in space dates back to the mid-1980s. Hundreds of students cultivated tomato seeds that had been launched aboard the space shuttle to determine if the exposure of the seeds to weightlessness influenced their development. Astronauts have cultivated wheat and other varieties of plants as well.
ESA will provide instruction for student participants in 13 languages in January.
The Thale Cress experiment will get under way in mid-February.
Paulo Nespoli Photo Credit/NASA
Nespoli will launch to the station with Russian Dmitri Kondratyev and American Catherine Coleman. Their Russian Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to lift off Dec. 15 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.