Sunday Supplement: Six Years on Mir
In the 1990s, some intrepid seeds spent a surprisingly long time on the Russian space station.
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It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of LDEF, a NASA satellite that carried 12.5 million tomato seeds into space and then got stuck there… for six years. But when I was researching China’s space-flown seeds program this week, I came across a reference to another set of tomato seeds that spent a long time in space.
An article from 2012 talks about Liu Min, a scientist who specialized in seed technology and consulted with the China Academy of Space Technology. It says that, in 2005, Liu’s team sowed tomato seeds that were a gift from Russia. The seeds had spent six years on the Mir space station (1992-98). Sowing the seeds produced mixed results; some did not sprout, while the successful plants grew big and small tomatoes. Liu’s team went into full-on breeding mode, selecting for good traits, but the unwanted characteristics persisted in the second and third generations. It wasn’t until the fourth generation that the researchers were confident that “that the traits were in the genes”.
So… I had a few details: tomato seeds, on Mir, from 1992 to 1998. What else could I find?
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