Space seeds return to Crawley Green Infant School

Tim Peake and the seeds. Photo by ESA / NASA

In September 2kg of salad rocket seeds were flown on Soyuz 44S to the International Space Station.

They have now returned to Earth, having spent six months in microgravity.

The seeds were sent as part of Rocket Science, an educational project launched by the RHS Campaign for School Gardening and the UK Space Agency.

The project was launched to celebrate British ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s Principia mission to the International Space Station and inspire young people to look into careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects.

The infant school will receive 100 seeds from space on Monday, April 18.

They will be grown alongside seeds that have not been sent to space to see the difference in growth, the children will not know which seeds have been to space.

Headteacher Gill Turner said: “We are very excited to be taking part in Rocket Science.

“This experiment is a fantastic way of teaching our children to think more scientifically and share their findings with the whole school community.”

Pupils will care for the seedlings, record their growth and observations over seven weeks and enter data into a database.

Scientists from the RHS and European Space Agency will interpret the results and draw possible conclusions, publishing their results on the Campaign for School Gardening Website.

For more information about the Rocket Science project, visit: www.gov.uk/rocketscience