Point Pleasant Boro Woman Could Launch Beans Into Space

POINT PLEASANT BORO – A Point Pleasant Boro woman has designed an experiment that was selected to launch to the International Space Station, hopefully in the fall.

Stockton University freshman Sophia Bradach wants to know if snow peas can self-fertilize through nitrogen fixation in a microgravity environment. She is working with her mentor, Peter Straub, dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, to find the answer, according to a Stockton release.

A space garden could help astronauts grow their own food, but on the International Space Station, space is limited. Storing bags of fertilizer for extended space travel isn’t realistic.

Bradach, who enjoys gardening and astrophysics, is combining her interests into an experiment that will test nitrogen fixation, a natural fertilizing process, in microgravity using snow peas.

The entire experiment fits into test tubes—one that will go to space and another that will stay on Earth. After the mission, nitrogen fixation will be measured in both scenarios and the rates will be compared.

Bradach and Straub are hoping to see that the rate and effectiveness of nitrogen fixation on earth also works in space.

If all goes well and the bacteria infects the roots, they believe that the rate of nitrogen fixation will be similar to the experiment that grows on earth.

Bradach says that this opportunity is “the perfect combo of my interests and has helped me to combine my passions and studies.”

The greenhouse at Stockton’s Unified Science Center served as Bradach’s lab space as she prepared the test tube with carefully measured quantities of bacteria, snow pea seeds, vermiculite (a lightweight soil), water, and lastly, a fixative that can be released into the test tube to halt the pea growth and nitrogen fixation.

Working among the plants, Bradach felt at home. “My room is half plants. It makes me happy when I come home,” she said. She’s incorporated fish tanks with frogs and beta fish too.

Bradach hopes to pursue a career in environmental remediation to clean up superfund sites, but in the meantime, she’s looking forward to a fall 2020 launch of her experiment that will be conducted by astronauts aboard the ISS.

Bradach’s experiment was made possible by the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S. and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic partnership with DreamUp PBC and NanoRacks LLC, which are working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.

This is the fourth year the experiments designed by Stockton students have been chosen to participate.

For experiment updates, visit www.stocktonspaceflight.org.