Last week, I told you about a couple of people whose ashes had flown in space. This week, I want to tell you about a piece of an apple tree that flew on the space shuttle to the International Space Station.

As part of the celebrations for the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, of which Isaac Newton was a former president, NASA astronaut Piers Sellers brought a fragment of the apple tree that inspired Newton’s discovery of gravity in 1666 with him when he flew on STS-132, the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station.

Though the tree still stands at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire where Newton lived, pieces of it were stored in the Royal Society’s vaults in the 1700s, along with a lot of other Newton memorabilia.

The piece of Isaac Newton’s apple tree that went with him was about 10 centimeters long and even had a little marking from the 17th century that read “I. Newton”. No one knows if it was inscribed by Sir Isaac himself.

According to an article in The Guardian that appeared shortly before the twelve-day mission in May 2010, Sellers said that he will “…take it up and let it float around for a bit, which will confuse Isaac.” He went on to say that: While it’s up there, it will be experiencing no gravity, so if it had an apple on it, the apple wouldn’t fall… Sir Isaac would have loved to see this, assuming he wasn’t spacesick, as it would have proved his first law of motion to be correct.

And where is it today? At the time, Martin Rees, the then president of the Royal Society, stated that: [u]pon their return the piece of tree and picture of Newton will form part of the History of the Royal Society exhibition that the Society will be holding later this year and will then be held as a permanent exhibit at the Society.

More Information

Newton’s famous apple tree to experience zero gravity (The Royal Society)

Isaac Newton’s apple tree to experience zero gravity – in space (The Guardian)