NASA sent 12.5 million tomato seeds to space; later planted across 40,000 schools

The seeds that NASA sent to space in 1984, returned to Earth six years later in 1990 and had to be distributed among students as plant kits. What lies behind this statement is a tale of space motion that many remain unaware of. The mission was to determine whether exposure to the space environment would affect the germination and plant growth of the seeds, but the agency was never able to observe the same.A hopeful experimentThe project was called SEEDS, which stands for Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students. It involved NASA headquarters, the Langley Research Centre and the company George W. Park Seed, a traditional seed supplier in US. The idea was to send a group of seeds into space and keep a group on Earth.