Marlborough College students are part of a project learning to grow tomatoes in outer space

More than 200 students at Marlborough College are taking part in an amazing space environment project to grow tomatoes aboard the International Space Station – and monitor the results.

The project began in 2001 in Canada, where experiments investigated the effects of the space environment on the growth of food like the tomato that will inevitably be one of the many used to support long-term human bases being established on the Moon, followed by Mars.

Tomatosphere, as it is called, is an educational outreach project involving more than 17,000 school classes in Canada and the United States with Marlborough College the only one elsewhere to be involved.

“Five Remove boys and 200 girls recently gathered to monitor the growth — or not — in a blind test of identical tomato seeds, half of which had spent 22 months in space aboard the international space station,” the College reports on its news website.

Two sets of seeds, both Heinz H9478, were received — a control group and a set of seeds that have been on the international space station for a period of 22 months.

The seeds were taken to the space station on the last shuttle in July, 2011 and returned to earth with Commander Chris Hadfield on May 15, 2013, on board a Russian Soyuz vehicle.

So one group of seeds that the pupils will germinate have travelled in excess of 450 million kilometres.

“Pupils will conduct the germination experiment in a blind test,” reports Charlie Barclay, head of astronomy at the College.  “They will not know the treatment associated with each of the groups of seeds until they have completed the germination component of the experiment.

“This will prevent any unintentional bias from creeping into the results.  The two groups are labelled T and V.

“Exposing the seeds to a variety of environments will help researchers to determine if, and how, the seeds are affected by events related to space travel.  This will help to determine what types of seeds have the highest potential for germination and growth in space — crucial to space missions where availability of physical space is a serious issue.

“The physical area on board a space vehicle is quite limited, thus restricting the number of plants that can be grown and the number of people who can be supported for extended periods.

“When a seed — and the plant that grows from it — is assigned to a space mission, it must sprout successfully and continue to grow healthy and strong and produce an abundance of fruit.

“Seeds that don’t germinate, and plants that are weak and don’t grow properly, are not contributing to the mission. Weak plants may also become sick and spread their illness to other plants, causing even more problems to the controlled-environment system.”