Two seeds that traveled around the moon find a permanent home in eastern Idaho
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POCATELLO – Two trees that traveled over a million miles as seeds have finally found a home in Idaho.
Idaho State University announced in May that the Idaho Museum of Natural History had just received a “moon tree” from NASA, and American Falls High School received one in June 2024. The university and the high school are two among hundreds of locations across the country that have received one of these moon trees as a part of a broad education initiative that inspires students to ask questions about space travel.
“A moon tree on campus will become part of outreach to our programs, bringing a piece of space exploration here to campus and challenging K-12 and college students to ask questions about what it means for a seed to travel to the moon and back,” reads an excerpt from the museum’s application for the moon tree.
Amber Tews, the assistant director of public operations, said that when the moon tree is ready to be planted, it will go on the northeast corner of the Quad, in front of the museum, where it will become part of a “stronger network of STEM education.”
“We’re going to use it to enhance our educational programming that we do with field trips,” Tews said, adding that teachers will be able to ask their students “what’s the science, the technology, the engineering, the math that it takes to not only take a rocket up to space, but also to take seeds up to space and then have them be viable when they come back.”
The trees that would eventually find a way to Idaho were two seeds out of more than 2,000 that were sent aboard the Orion spacecraft, which traveled all the way around the moon on NASA’s Artemis I mission in November and December of 2022. The unmanned mission lasted for 25.5 days and traveled more than 1.4 million miles, according to a release from the space agency.
As of December 2024, the seeds had been sent to 236 locations across the contiguous United States.
In June 2024, the U.S. Forest Service, which partnered with NASA for the moon tree project, released a news release on the tree in American Falls. That tree’s custodian is high school student Brianna Morales, and she was mentored in how to care for it by plant science teacher Bret Kindall.
This batch of trees is the second set that has gone into space and returned to Earth. In 1971, astronaut Stuart Roosa brought hundreds of seedlings aboard the Kitty Hawk on NASA’s Apollo 14 mission, which were also sent out across the country to be planted and grow into moon trees.
Tews said that ISU also received one of these moon trees, planting it on campus somewhere near the Gale Life Science building in 1976, but it’s not there anymore and no one knows what happened to it. In fact, an arborist with ISU walked the grounds and couldn’t find a single Douglas fir, the species of tree it received, anywhere around the building.
“Unfortunately, it’s no longer there, (and) nobody really knows what happened to it,” Tews said.
The nascent moon tree is growing in the Life Sciences Greenhouse on campus, where it will remain until it is strong enough to be planted. The museum plans to plant it sometime in August or September during ISU’s 125th Anniversary kick-off celebration.
“Instead of (burying) a time capsule, we’re growing a tree,” Tews said.
Tews told EastIdahoNews.com how it felt when she picked up ISU’s new moon tree.
“I’m actually touching something that came from space,” she thought. “You can have meteorites that you can touch, but they’re not alive. So it was kind of one of these surreal moments to touch a moon tree, a tree that went around the moon.”
Tews said that when she had the tree in her office, staff at the museum all came by to get a look at the tree and touch it themselves.
“Everyone’s been pretty excited about … watching it grow and making an impact on our environment and our space,” Tews said.