Project Juno: Pansy seeds in space

In December 2015, as we were waiting for Tim Peake to launch to the ISS and start his Principia mission, I talked about Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. In that blog post, I quoted David M. Harland, from his book The Mir Space Station: A Precursor to Space Colonization:

“Several biological experiments were carried out, including Vazon to cultivate ginseng, onion and chlorella. Vita to study the growth of cells producing luciferase (a biologically active albumen), and Seeds, which simply required that a bag of tomato seeds be left in the airlock during the handover so that genetic irregularities resulting from their exposure to ambient radiation could be studied when they were planted on their return to Earth.”

Six months later, the blog post received a comment from a man who said that he owned a packet of pansy seeds that had been in space with Helen Sharman. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it, but it nagged at me, and I have been investigating.

And it turns out that David M. Harland got this fact wrong (although I think it’s a good book generally, and he is a well-respected space historian).

“A bag of 250,000 pansy seeds was placed in the Kvant 2 EVA airlock, a compartment not as protected from cosmic radiation as other Mir compartments. Sharman also contacted nine British schools by radio and conducted high-temperature superconductor experiments with the Elektropograph-7K device.”

(I have seen some references to it being 125,000 seeds stashed on board, which I think is the correct figure. I think there were 250,000 seeds in the experiment in total, split into two batches – one that flew in space, and a control group that didn’t.)

In February 1995, Orbit, the Journal of the Astro Space Stamp Society, produced