Will it be possible to grow plants on the Moon?
For now, it has been possible to grow them in samples of lunar soil, at the University of Florida
Even for scientists it was surprising, says Robert Ferl, a scientist at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida.
“The first message was: ‘How wonderful! Plants can grow on lunar soil. In addition, we have now learned that there are some things we must know and be able to do better if we are to cultivate.”
The experiment was carried out by scientists at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.on lunar soil brought to Earth by Neil Armstrong and his crew during the Apollo 11 Mission more than 50 years ago.
Biologist and geneticist Anna-Lisa Paul explains: “During its first week of life, there really wasn’t any difference between the controls and the lunar plants. plants. All we have to do is figure out how to mitigate the negative effects”.
**A year ago. In several mini-capsules, watercress seeds were placed in a gram of lunar soil.**Although the researchers found that the shoots grew more slowly and with stunted roots, the results were considered encouraging.
Geologist Stephen Elardo says: “This was the first step in what we hope will be a very long, multi-decade process to discover this material and when we get back to the moon, do it on the lunar surface.
Being able to grow food on the moon would be a giant step forward for future astronauts’ missions. The study is timely for NASA, which is preparing for inhabited and robotic exploration of the Moon, through missions of the Artemis program.
“This investigation is crucial to NASA’s long-term human exploration goals,” said Bill Nelson, head of the US space agency. “We will have to use the resources found on the Moon and Mars to develop food sources for future astronauts who will live in deep space.”
For your experience, researchers used just 12 grams of lunar soil (or a few teaspoons), collected from various locations on the Moon during the Apollo missions..
In small pots the size of a thimble, they placed about a gram of soil – regolith – at a time, added water and then the seeds. A nutrient solution was also added daily.
At the same time, seeds were planted in the soil of our own Earth and samples of lunar and Martian soil for comparison.
After two days, the seeds from the lunar samples germinated.
“All the plants in both the lunar soil samples and the control samples looked the same by day six,” said Anna-Lisa Paul, lead author of the study.
But after that, it turned out that lunar plants grew slower and had stunted roots.
After 20 days, the scientists harvested them and studied their DNA. They found that the plants on the Moon reacted the same way they would react to a hostile environment, such as soil with too much salt or heavy metals.
In the future, scientists want to understand how this environment can be made more hospitable.
The experiments are the first to investigate whether plants can grow on lunar soil and follow an 11-year effort to obtain the rare material. Because soil is so precious, NASA only loaned 12g of it to the researchers who performed the tests.
Scientists have long wondered whether the Moon could host the crops, but with space agencies now planning to return humans to the surface, and potentially building lunar settlements for visitors, the question has become more pressing.
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