NASA sent 12.5M tomato seeds to space in 1984; by 1990, 40,000 schools in 40 countries grew them

The seeds that NASA sent to space in 1984, returned to Earth six years later in 1990 and had to be distributed among students as plant kits. What lies behind this statement is a tale of space motion that many remain unaware of. The mission was to determine whether exposure to the space environment would affect the germination and plant growth of the seeds, but the agency was never able to observe the same.A hopeful experimentThe project was called SEEDS, which stands for Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students. It involved NASA headquarters, the Langley Research Centre and the company George W. Park Seed, a traditional seed supplier in US. The idea was to send a group of seeds into space and keep a group on Earth. Then, both sets of identical seeds would be distributed to the schools so that students could plant them side by side and compare the results.All 12.5 million seeds belonged to the variety Rutgers California Supreme, a common tomato in American cultivation. This was chosen because using a single variety prevents genetic differences from skewing the results. The equipment that carried the seeds into space was the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), a twelve-sid...