The students in Mrs. Bogardus’ Intro to Ag class are becoming space farmers! Through a collaboration with NASA and Fairchild Botanical Gardens, students built a research growth chamber to study fertilizer application rates and a few weeks ago they launched a pepper pollination project on the grow tables in the shop.
Growing Beyond Earth is a highly successful classroom-based citizen science research project operated in partnership with NASA. This classroom-based STEM program is a series of authentic plant experiments conducted by students using equipment similar to NASA’s Vegetable Production System on the International Space Station. GBE evolved out of NASA’s efforts to find suitable crops for long term space missions. With experiments currently in progress in more than 235 middle and high schools across the country, GBE is providing a steady stream of valuable data to NASA scientists who are developing technologies for growing food crops for long-duration missions into deep space.
We’re super excited to see the results of their experiments and students will present their research to NASA scientists and administrators during the annual Student Research Symposium later this spring.
