Growing Beyond Earth (GBE) 

Growing Beyond Earth (GBE) is a classroom-based citizen science program designed to advance NASA research on growing plants in space and to inspire the next generation of explorers. As humans expand into space farther from Earth, the ability to grow sustainable food crops is a solution to a major challenge of long-duration, deep-space missions.

In our Terraforming Mars Enrichment Science, we collaborated with NASA, Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens in order to explore the growth characteristics of different lettuce varieties under simulated space conditions.

The information collected from our experiment about different crop readiness for Growing Beyond Earth, directly supports NASA’s goals for growing crops in space environments, initially trialled on the International Space Station (ISS).

Late April, we planted the seeds, and from then to the end of May, we recorded the amount of water added daily, alongside the chamber's humidity and temperature, strictly following the required NASA protocols. Weekly, we took photos of the plants, and on day 14, we thinned the plants. After that, we took measurements of the plant's width, height, and depth every week. All of our data has been submitted to NASA, and very soon, we will design and conduct our own experiment using the growing chamber, but with our chosen design variables.

Our lettuce germination apparatus

NASA Astronauts harvest the first red lettuce 

harvested on the ISS as a result of the GBE program.

~ JMSS students: 

Grace Liu, Arielle Butera, Dylan Holdsworth, Ellum Shrestha, Toby Cantos, Y10

We would like to say huge thanks to Ms Grainger for her assistance and to our amazing lab team, especially Ms Erika Trickett, for supporting and guiding us through this investigation.