CAPE CANAVER, Florida (AP) – For the first time, scientists have grown plants in the soil from the moon, collected by NASA astronauts Apollo.
The researchers had no idea if anything would grow into the raw lunar dirt, and they wanted to see if it could be used to grow food by the next generation of lunar researchers. The results stunned them.
“Sacred cow. Plants actually grow into lunar things. Are you kidding?” said Robert Firl of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida.
Ferll and his colleagues planted cress in lunar soil returned by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and other Apollo 11 lunar rovers. The good news: All the seeds have sprouted.
The downside was that after the first week, the roughness and other properties of the lunar soil loaded the small flowering weeds so much that they grew slower than seedlings planted in fake lunar dirt from Earth. Most of the moon plants turned out to be stunted.
The results were published Thursday in Communications Biology.
The longer the soil was exposed to punitive cosmic radiation and the sun’s wind on the moon, the worse the plants looked. The Apollo 11 samples – exposed to the elements several billion years longer due to the older surface of the Sea of Tranquility – are the least conducive to growth, scientists say.
“It’s a big step forward to understand that you can grow plants,” said Simon Gilroy, a space plant biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who had no role in the study. “The real next step is to go and do it on the surface of the moon.
The lunar dirt is full of small glass fragments of micrometeorite impacts that have landed everywhere in Apollo’s lunar spacecraft and worn out the spacecraft’s spacesuits.
One solution may be to use younger geological spots on the moon, such as lava flows, to dig up the soil for planting. The environment can also be adjusted by changing the food mixture or adjusting the artificial lighting,
Only 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of moon rocks and soil were returned by six Apollo crews. Some of the earliest lunar dust was sprinkled on quarantined plants by Apollo astronauts in Houston after returning from the moon.
Most of the lunar hiding places remained locked, forcing researchers to experiment with simulated soil made of volcanic ash on Earth. NASA finally distributed 12 grams to researchers at the University of Florida early last year, and the long-awaited planting took place in a laboratory last May.
NASA has said the time for such an experiment is finally right, with the space agency wanting to return astronauts to the moon in a few years.
The ideal situation would be for future astronauts to take advantage of the endless supply of available local dirt for indoor planting in exchange for a hydroponic or all-water system, scientists said.
“The fact that something has grown means that we have a really good starting point, and now the question is how to optimize and improve,” said Sharmila Bhatacarya, NASA’s program scientist in space biology.
Scientists in Florida hope to recycle their lunar soil later this year by planting more talus before possibly switching to other vegetation.
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The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Scientific Education. AP is solely responsible for all content.
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