Nutation of Helianthus Annuus in a microgravity environment

An experiment to gather evidence to decide between the Darwinian concept of endogenously motivated nutation and the more mechanistic concept of gravity dependent nutation is described. If nutation persists in weightlessness, parameters describing the motion will be measured by recording in time lapse mode the video images of a population of seedlings that were grown at 1-g, but which will be observed at virtual zero gravity. Later, the plant images will be displayed on a video monitor in a laboratory, photographed on 16 millimeter film, and analyzed frame by frame to determine the kinetics of nutation for each specimen tested.