The good news for proponents of space colonization is that scientists have shown that you can grow plants in lunar dirt. But the bad news for anyone imagining a lush green salad bar for a lunar astronaut is that plants grown in lunar regolith do not grow very well and are usually stressed by experience.
In a new study published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology, researchers at the University of Florida are growing lunar regolith plants from NASA’s Apollo missions for the first time, comparing their growth to that of plants planted in volcanic ash.
Poor performance of Apollo plants is a challenge for proponents of in situ resource use, a term for astronauts who create their water, oxygen, fuel or, in this case, food from resources found on an extraterrestrial body. instead of packing them from home.
Researchers planted Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant known as thale cres, either in lunar regolith samples returned to Earth from Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions, or in control soil based on volcanic ash designed to mimic lunar regolith. . Plants planted in lunar samples grow slower, smaller, and show more signs of stress, such as pigmentation and expression of stress-related genes, than those grown in volcanic ash.
And while plants grown in volcanic ash develop more or less evenly, plants grown in the Apollo 11 samples perform worse than plants grown in the Apollo 12 and 17 samples, which suggests variability in the samples. The Apollo 11 sample, for example, has been exposed to solar and cosmic radiation for the longest time, and researchers speculate that the effects of this long-term energy bombardment could make lunar regolith particularly reactive to biology.
The study was the first to attempt to grow plants in lunar regolith as the main growth medium, and the results contrast with those of experiments conducted in the 1970s.
During the Apollo program, researchers broke the lunar regolith by giving the plants growing in the ground a lining of lunar dust and found that the plants actually thrive compared to controls. The experiments were mainly aimed at ensuring the absence of unknown pathogens or toxins lurking in the moon samples brought by astronauts, and the researchers believed that the additional nutrients were responsible for plant growth.
The seeds taken to the moon by Apollo astronauts and returned to Earth were then planted, many of them successfully growing into mature “moon trees,” but the experiment looked at the viability of seeds carried into space, not seeds in space. the soil from space.
Most recently, in 2019, an experiment on the Chinese lunar spacecraft Chang’e 4 successfully germinated seeds on the moon for the first time, but did so in a sealed container using terrestrial soil
The conclusion of this study is that growing crops on the moon will not be as easy as simply putting a greenhouse under pressure and planting seeds. As with other in situ resource experiments, more research is needed.
Space agencies such as NASA and the European Space Agency are currently studying many different technologies to use resources discovered in space, so astronauts do not have to pack everything they need with them from Earth. Esa scientists are studying how to extract oxygen from molten lunar regolith, for example, while NASA’s Perseverance Mars experimental device is extracting oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.
NASA plans to return to the moon in 2025 as part of the Artemis space agency’s program, which aims to use the moon as a practice area before a mission to Mars in the early 2040s. Astronauts who spend weeks or months on the moon will have ample opportunity to experiment with the use of in situ resources, including ways to modify lunar regolith, to be more plant-friendly.
And that could take a lot of experimentation, according to the study’s authors.
“Additional features and optimization will be needed before regolith can be considered a routine resource on site, especially in places where regolith is very mature,” the article said.
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