Tomatosphere is
an educational outreach project that reaches over 8,000 classrooms
across Canada, the US and other nations. Students have the
opportunity to grow tomatoes from Heinz tomato seeds with a variety
of background exposures. The tomato seeds for 2007 are in two
envelopes – labeled ‘R’ and ‘S’. One envelope contains the control
group; the other group has been exposed to a simulated space
environment with temperatures of negative 80 degrees Celsius and low
atmospheric pressure for a period of 18 days. This simulates a
breach in the space vehicle’s storage system on a long-term journey
in space. Students will not know which seed group is which
thus making this a blind study and will allow the mystery of the
project to be real for the students.
Register for
the program now.
The
Experiment
Observations
Reporting the Results
Extension Ideas
Submit
Results
Observations (week 2): The seeds
from group S germinated faster than group R. Ethan thinks
the S seeds are the ones that were in space like conditions.
He thinks that may have helped these seeds grow faster.
Observations (week 3):
The seeds from group S grew faster than group R but the plants from
group R are fewer but look much, much stronger.
Final Results:
Ethan made the correct guess. The
seeds that germinated first were in fact the space seeds. In
the end, we discovered that the seeds that were subjected to space
germinated about 3 days faster than the regular Earth seeds.
Although they were faster germinators, they turned out to be dinky
little weakling plants. The Earth seeds were slower to
germinate but were much, much stronger plants. Can't wait to
see how the tomatoes turn out from both sets of plants!
Project
Photos from Tomatosphere
toadhaven.com
