Education Payload Operations-Tomatosphere II (EPO-Tomatosphere II)
Research Area: Educational Demonstrations
Expedition(s): 9-11
Principal Investigator(s): ● Jonathan Neubauer and Matthew Keil, NASA’s Johnson Space
Center, Houston, Texas
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
Education Payload Operations-Tomatosphere II (EPO-
Tomatosphere II) includes curriculum-based educational
activities that demonstrate basic principles of science,
space, and agriculture. These activities are videotaped
and then used in classroom lectures. EPO-Tomatosphere
II is designed to support the NASA mission to inspire the
next generation of explorers.EARTH BENEFITS
EPO-Tomatosphere II is part of NASA's continuing effort
to use space as a unique educational tool for K-12
students.SPACE BENEFITS
EPO-Tomatosphere II introduces the next
generation of explorers to the environment of
space.
RESULTS
The 1.5 million Tomatosphere-II seeds from
Expedition 9 were divided and distributed to
160,000 students in 6,000 classrooms across
Canada.
This investigation is complete and all results are
published.
ISS009E15359 - Astronaut Mike Fincke
holds a bag of tomato seeds for the
Education Payload Operations
Tomatosphere II project in the SM during
Expedition 9.
During a previous Tomatosphere program, students
studied the growth of tomato plants in Miss Smith’s
grade 3 class at Langley Fundamental Elementary,
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The students
took their plants home to grow in their gardens over
the summer. Tomatosphere image.