Students at a STEAM Magnet school in California planted a sequoia sprout. This tree is known for growing to giant sizes and for its valuable wood. However, the particular species that the teens got is interesting for another reason. It was grown from seeds that had traveled around the Moon.
Students planted an unusual tree
On October 14, students from the STEAM Magnet school located in Santiago, California, planted a tree. This news wouldn’t be unusual if they weren’t grown from seeds that traveled around the moon on the Orion spacecraft in 2022.
The STEAM Magnet school is quite unusual. It is a small private institution with about 500 children. It aims to explore science and technology. NASA has close ties with it, and one of the lunar tree saplings was given there.
Students took part in the planting of the unusual plant with pleasure, because many of them dream of flying into space. To date, the sequoia is quite small. However, trees of this species are famous for living for thousands of years and growing to really huge sizes.
Therefore, especially for inquisitive teenagers, ropes were used to lay out circles on the ground during tree planting, which show what size the sapling would be in 50 and 500 years. And while it grows, it will be cared for by volunteers.
Moon sequoia
The sequoia planted at a school in Santiago is not the first “moon tree” on U.S. land. Another of the Apollo-14 astronauts carried a bag of seeds to our moon. After the flight, it was germinated and planted in various states from Alabama to Washington.
In 2022, seeds of different plants were placed aboard the Orion spacecraft quite deliberately. The main task of the Artemis-1 mission is to check the normal operation of all systems of the spacecraft and the carrier. However, even from the unmanned flight, scientists tried to extricate a maximum of scientific information.
That’s why the astronauts’ place on board was taken by seeds. There is a lot of radiation in space, and scientists were wondering how it would affect the germination of some of our green neighbors on the planet. It turned out that those were fine. So NASA employees had to reclassify themselves as gardeners and hastily distribute 150 seedlings of “moon trees”.
Most of them were given to various national parks, but some were given to museums and educational institutions. That’s how one of them got into the STEAM Magnet school. And this is not the end, because NASA has the next batch of “moon trees,” and they will also distribute them.
According to phys.org
