TAMPA, Fla. — Can you grow food on the moon? That’s the question Stewart Middle Magnet School students have been called to answer for NASA. 

It’s the “Plant the Moon Challenge.” 

NASA selected 10 schools in Florida, including Stewart Middle, to participate in the challenge. Students will examine how vegetables grow in lunar soil. 

It’s not every day you get a firsthand look at scientists working in conjunction with NASA in action.

“I’m mixing the soil, the moon soil with the earth soil, that we combined with water,” said seventh grader Donnay Walker.

Walker and her classmates are planting beet seeds in their mixture of lunar soil simulant. Then they’ll test the effect of light on growth.

“I feel like if we have a light that’s directly right here, more of like a yellow light, it’s going to grow better,” she said.

The class will have to wait eight weeks to find out if it works. The students will document the process along the way, then report back to NASA, something Walker said she never dreamed of doing.

“It feels exciting because that’s big for seventh grade, and it continues more opportunities for people, and how we can go to college, and you can say that you did something for NASA,” she said.

Other classes will test the use of fertilizers, heat, and other variables to see which produce the most vegetables. Their ideas will potentially feed astronauts on the moon for years to come.

And it is no easy task since the moon’s soil, called lunar regolith, is very sharp and abrasive.

Stewart Middle Magnet School won a grant through the Florida Space Grant Consortium to participate in the Plant the Moon Challenge.

At the end of April, all the schools participating nationwide will submit their findings to NASA and attend a virtual award ceremony.