Tomato seeds that were carried into space aboard a space shuttle and experimented on by astronauts in the 1980s only made it past Sydney's Biosecurity officers after a blast of gamma rays.
The Tomato Rutgers California Supreme seeds were launched into space in April 1984 aboard NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility on Space Shuttle Challenger and returned to Earth in January 1990 on Space Shuttle Columbia.
They were part of an outer space seed experiment to see if the weightlessness and long exposure to radiation in space affects the seeds' growth.
The seeds found their way to Italy in the intervening decades but, in late May, arrived undeclared in Sydney and were intercepted by border agents and biosecurity officers.
Head of Biosecurity Operations, Nico Padovan, said the NASA space seeds were an interesting and unusual find that potentially posed a biosecurity risk, as they could carry unknown plant pests or diseases from Italy - or beyond.
"All seeds or plant material imported to Australia must meet our biosecurity conditions regardless of the country, or galaxy, they've arrived from," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
The biosecurity officers irradiated the seeds using gamma rays to mitigate the risk to Australia's agriculture and, given their relative safety, were returned to the importer in July.
"These particular seeds posed a relatively low risk, as they did not encounter alien life forms when in orbit and the importer is keeping them on display as a collector's item and not for sowing purposes," Mr Padovan said.
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