Students help out in space salad study
Growing salad in space is a step closer to becoming a reality, thanks to hundreds of thousands of young people who helped conduct an out-of-thisworld experiment.
The project started in 2015, when British astronaut Tim Peake took a million rocket seeds with him on his journey to the International Space Station (ISS). The seeds spent six months there before they were sent back to Earth in 2016. In a message sent from the ISS, Peake said the science experiment was to find out if the conditions in space, such as lack of gravity, affected the seeds’ ability to grow.
Around 600,000 pupils at 8,600 schools in the UK were then asked to grow the rocket seeds that had been to space, along with regular seeds that had never left the planet. Peake described the experiment as “one of the largest and most inspirational experiments of its kind”.
The results of the study, which have just been published, found that the space speeds grew more slowly than the ones that had stayed on Earth, because they had aged quicker. Researchers on the experiment said this was due to the stresses of space travel, such as the zero-gravity atmosphere and high levels of cosmic rays, which slowed the growth of the plants. Cosmic rays are high-energy, fast-moving particles made up of tiny bits of atoms. Most of them come from outside the solar system, although some come from the Sun.
Although the space seeds grew slightly slower than the regular Earth seeds, researchers are hopeful that if the seeds are properly protected it might be possible to grow plants during future space missions to other planets. Dr Jake Chandler, from Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the study, said, “the prospect of eating home-grown salad on Mars may be one small step closer”.