North Gwinnett News

Seckinger High School's ecology students have embarked on an ambitious project to cultivate plants capable of thriving beyond Earth. Last semester, funded by a grant from the Space Grant Consortium, these students explored plant life that could potentially survive on Mars. The senior team, which successfully grew beans, received the "Best Growth" award. This initiative, known as Plant Mars, is a collaborative effort with the Institute of Competition Sciences and NASA. It aims to inspire students to innovate and tackle "real-world challenge-based" scenarios.

"This is the first time [we’ve] done planting and had to research [our] own investigation. [We] learned how to work in a team, and we learned that we can do science experiments and had a lot of fun growing our beans," stated the team.

The project employed a learning approach where students competed to grow crops using Martian regolith simulant—a substance mimicking Mars's rocky surface layer. Five teams from grades 9-12 were involved in designing experiments aimed at understanding plant growth on Mars while minimizing Earth's material use. Besides beans, other teams experimented with radishes, mint, tomatoes, and bell peppers.

Students discovered that Mars's regolith lacks organic content necessary for plant growth. They concluded that enriching it with organic materials from Earth was essential. The most robust plants emerged from a mixture of coconut peat and regolith.

Seckinger High's ecology students will continue their extraterrestrial agriculture endeavors as they have been chosen again for the Space Grant Consortium’s Plant the Moon competition in Spring 2025. These grants are available biannually across various U.S. states.