You carefully prepare your soil. You plant a seed in your carefully prepared soil. You tenderly care for your planted seed in your carefully prepared soil. Finally, you see you truly do have a "green thumb" when your seedling sprouts upward from your carefully prepared soil.

You become convinced your plant will grow even better if you speak nicely to it. You do so and even add soft classical music as it grows. Ahh, success!

Then, an unusual change occurs with your plant. The stem begins to curve downward towards the soil and its roots. You know this cannot be correct. Plants always grow upward - not necessarily straight up but upwards nonetheless.

You check with your family - your friends - even your teacher - and they all agree you have a very unique plant. They all agree plants do not normally grow downward. Plants should always grow upward towards a light source - and upward away from the pull of gravity. You wonder if gravity has begun to pull your entire plant downward.

You turn to the Internet for assistance to find information about your plant's unusual growth. The website you visit reminds you of the importance of plants to our lives. Plants provide food and the oxygen we need, purify our water, and even help remove and recycle the carbon dioxide we exhale.

You soon visit a NASA website that discusses how plants can grow in space. You already know that space can be very dark and cold. You realize a lack of carbon dioxide there can also affect the plant. Experiments have been conducted on the space shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS) with plant growth. It appears you have finally found a resource that can help you understand why plants grow downward.

One point you discover is that plants have actually been part of experiments in space since 1960. The first plant materials were in orbit aboard the USSR Sputnik 4 satellite. Millions of tomato seeds were placed into space aboard an earth-orbiting object called LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility). The seeds were exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space for 5.5 years and then returned to Earth. These seeds were grown on Earth and tested for unusual growth patterns. Most tomatoes grown from these seeds were considered to have ¿normal¿ taste and growth patterns. Plant growth experiments began in earnest during the 1990s aboard the space shuttle with exposure to microgravity. Experiments have been extended in the past few years to growth onboard the International Space Station.

The next website you will visit explains why we study plants in space. Scientists have determined that gravity truly does help a plant grow upward (away from gravity). Space experiments show that many times a plant will grow in the direction of its root source after sprouting from the soil. That sounds like your plant! Astronauts have also continued research of growing plants in space with hydroponics units, which use water without soil to "feed" nutrients to the plants.

How can we use this information on Earth? If we understand these results, we may be able to grow more plants in less space. This information can potentially help forestry workers grow new trees faster in burned areas. Losing plants in a region may no longer be a concern if we can quickly grow new plants and crops from the results of experiments in space.

Space flight scientists know that our future manned exploration of deep space will require that we grow our own plants in space. We would never have enough storage space to take everything we need to eat. These same future astronauts will always need a fresh oxygen supply as well as clean water to drink. Plants can help provide them with such needs. In 1997, for the first time, astronauts and cosmonauts on the Russian Mir space station were able to produce seed pods from plants grown in space. These "space farmers" could not be more proud of their achievements!

After conducting this research, you plan to brainstorm reasons that will help you answer questions about your plant and its direction of growth. You wish you could conduct your plant research in space. Perhaps you will be able to do that someday!

You've always wished you could go into space. It sounds cool to know you can be both a botanist and an astronaut. Your friends have lost count of the number of times you have changed what you want to do in your life. You are sure they will support your new career choice to experiment with plants in space. You are happy knowing you can work for NASA someday. Thanks, NASA!