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Space Seeds
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Student Experiment, Back From Outer Space
On Monday, December 12, 2005, students in Jo Marie Fretto's
class at Central Park Middle School ripped open a sealed mailer
sent from Wallops Flight Facility at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center. They received their first two vials of sunflower
and pumpkins seeds that they sent into space aboard the
International Space Station last year.
The "Cosmic
Veggies" experiment is part of NASA's Space Experiment Module (SEM)
Satchel program, which sends a special space-ready satchel
containing "passive" school experiments into space for storage
on the International Space Station.
The seeds
entered space aboard a Russian supply rocket on December 25,
2004. They were delivered to Space Station Expedition 10
crew members Leroy Chiao and Salizhan Sharipov. The
astronauts tested the seeds for microgravity and the effects of
space travel.
The seeds
returned to Earth in April. NASA process them and retuned
them to Central Park Middle School, home of the first NASA
Explorer School in New York State.
Central Park's
experiment is designed to gauge the impact of space flight and
the conditions of space has on the seeds. The data will
help scientists determine the feasibility of growing food in
space.
A doctor at St.
Peter's Hospital will help the students split some of the seeds
and place them on microscope slides. The students will
compare the seeds to non-space seeds, examining them for
differences in size, structure and molecular levels.
The other seeds
will be planted after the holiday recess, with students
observing and charting the differences in the space seeds'
germination and growth rates. Students will take the
plants home and keep them after the experiment is complete.
The delivery of
the seeds to the Space Station comes less than a month after
Central Park and other Schenectady schools talked live with
Space Station Expedition 12 astronauts via a ham radio/phone
link. Students spoke with Chiao and Salizhan Sharipov vis
a NASA video downlink in January.
This isn't the
first time Central Park has had an experiment shot into space.
Last year, NASA launched seeds from the Pine Bush - part of an
experiment dubbed "Garden From the Stars" - into space aboard
the Space Shuttle Columbia on the shuttle's ill-fated 2003
flight. Students from Central Park and Guilderland's
Farnsworth Middle School collaborated on that project.
DECEMBER 2005
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