dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (10/07/84)
Students will have a chance to grow tomatoes from seeds that have spent a year in space. We'll talk more about it -- after this. October 7 Seeds in Space Last April, Space Shuttle astronauts made the first successful housecall to repair a satellite already in orbit -- a satellite called Solar Max. But before Solar Max could come on-board the Shuttle for repairs, the cargo bay was emptied of another payload -- a 30-foot-long, 12-sided cylinder called the Long Duration Exposure Facility. The LDEF isn't designed to DO anything but simply sit in space -- and hold a wide variety of space experiments. At the moment, fifty-seven separate experiments are aboard the LDEF -- which'll remain in space until the shuttle comes back to get the cylinder this coming spring. The materials in the different experiments are being exposed to space conditions such as weightlessness and cosmic rays. For example, among the other experiments are twelve and a half million tomato seeds packed in five aluminum canisters. Instruments in the canisters are recording the temperature of the seeds while in space -- they're determining just how much space radiation the seeds are accumulating. Next spring a shuttle will retrieve the LDEF and bring it back to Earth. Then, the fifty-seven different experiments will be analyzed for the results of their exposure time in space. For their part, the tomato seeds are going to go into classrooms across the nation. NASA plans to distribute both space seeds and control seeds to school teachers upon their request. Students from fifth grade through college can participate -- comparing the difference between plants grown from the tomato seeds that spent a year in space -- and the ones that never left the Earth. Script by Diana Hadley and Deborah Byrd. ---------------------------- S.E.E.D.S. (Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students), NASA, Education Services branch, LFC, Washington, DC 20546 (c) Copyright 1983, 1984 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin