All across Australia, thousands of school students are growing space wattles. They’re doing the What’ll Happen to The Wattle??! program, run by the One Giant Leap Australia Foundation.
One Giant Leap director Jackie Carpenter organised for hundreds of wattle seeds to travel to the International Space Station for six months. Now they’re back on Earth, students are experimenting to learn whether space has changed how they’ll grow.
Each school gets twelve wattle seeds – six which went to space, and six that stayed on Earth. As each plant grows, the schools will measure their progress and upload it to the program’s app and website.
“This isn’t just a quick ‘grow wheat seeds in a plate then throw it out when you’re done’ experiment,” says Jackie. “This is a long-term citizen science project.” And that means no-one knows what the results will be.
“A lot of kids’ first question is ‘Are aliens going to grow?’. I just tell them ‘It’s never been done before. I don’t know.’”
For more information, including how to register your school, visit https://seedsinspace.com.au/whtw/.
This article was published in Issue 52 of Double Helix magazine (https://www.csiro.au/en/Education/Double-Helix). Copyright for this article is held by CSIRO.
Lachlan Writes Science 