JSC (AV) - Skylab 4 - ED 61/62 Plant Growth, Plant Phototropism - TV 68 Part 1

Description

FR #A221 SKYLAB 4 KINESCOPE TAPE 8, PART 3 of 3 Hello! Welcome again to Skylab 3 and the science demonstrations. Today we're going to be talking about plant growth in zero-G. A little over a year ago, Joel Watercamper in Nebraska, a high school student, was wondering what would happen if he took radish seeds and put them in zero-G - that's the absence of any forces from gravity - which way would they grow. Would the stem grow up, would the roots go down? Which way is up and down? About the same time, Don Slack in Downey, California also pondered the same question and thought well, maybe if you stimulate them with light, you can force them to grow in a given direction. It's how much light does it take. Well, the net result of this - of these two thoughts - were put together into a high school experiment and that's what we're going to start on now. What we have are eight compartments with agar, which is for this particular experiment is consistent mostly of water. You see six compartments here in the front and two are completely shielded from all light together. Now each one of these compartments will receive light of a different degree. These windows each transmit a different amount of light. What we're about to do is to plant some rice seeds. Three rice seeds in each compartment, and then we'll expose it to one of the lights that we have here and watch it over the course of many days just to see what happens to the ones without do the ones without any light grow the same as those with a lot of light? Which way will the roots grow? Towards the light? Away from it? Or in some sort of random direction. That's where we're going to start now. Sounds interesting. First we're going to plant the seeds. We have a seed ejector which ejects three seeds in each compartment. The seeds we have chosen are rice seeds that are particularly adapted for this type of experiment - they grow readily in water and grow quite rapidly. Let's take a look first of all at all of the compartments. (garble) Sure enough, if you look close enough, you'll see three seeds in each one of them. Here, let me clue you in a bit. The seeds are planted and mounted right up here next to the light. I don't have the light on right now and it makes it awful hard on the TV which you'll see in a moment here, but we'll leave this light on continuously and watch our seeds grow over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, out of this, we'll learn something about how we might grow food in the future on spacestations and secondly, how I think we'll Page 2 - #A221 learn a little bit about how plants grow right down there on earth. What makes them grow up, down, what effect does light and gravity have on them? It's gonna' be interesting.

Collection

Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Series

Moving Images Relating to Documentary Stock Footage