Scientists make it possible to grow plants on the Moon

It looks like the plot of a science fiction movie, but it is a totally real experiment. This is a group of scientists who demonstrated that Is it possible to plant vegetables in lunar soil?as part of a project to conserve these organisms in extreme climates and make way for new human colonies in space.

Researchers at the University of Florida grew the plants in lunar regolith, using a 12-gram sample provided by NASA. The institution took 11 years to respond to the scientists’ requests, but they were finally granted 4 grams more than they had requested.

The research was published on the “Communications Biology” site and explained the scientists’ motivation for growing the plants in the small samples of lunar soil they had.

“Artemis will require a better understanding of how to grow plants in space,” said Rob Ferl, one of the study’s authors and a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Anna-Lisa Paul, another study author and a research professor of horticultural sciences at UFL highlighted the importance of plants in lunar exploration: “Plants helped establish that soil samples brought back from the moon did not harbor pathogens or other constituents unknowns that would harm terrestrial life, but those plants were only dusted with lunar regolith and never grown in it.”

“What happens when you grow plants in lunar soil, something that is totally outside of the evolutionary experience of a plant? What would plants do in a lunar greenhouse? Could we have lunar farmers?” were some of the questions Ferl asked himself.

To grow their little lunar garden, the researchers used thimble-sized wells in plastic dishes normally used to grow cells. Once each “pot” was filled with about a gram of lunar soil, the scientists moistened the soil with a nutrient solution and added some seeds of the Arabidopsis plant, explains the University of Florida website.

The researchers also grew the Arabidopsis plant in JSC-1A, a terrestrial substance that mimics real lunar soil, as well as simulated Martian soils and terrestrial soils from extreme environments, for comparison. The results they obtained between each pot, including lunar regolith, were varied.

Some of the plants that grew in lunar soils were smaller, slower-growing, or more varied in size than their counterparts. These were all physical signs that plants were working to cope with the chemical and structural makeup of the moon’s soil, Paul explained.

The way plants respond to lunar soil may be related to where the soil was collected, the researchers said.

“The moon is a very, very dry place. How will the minerals in the lunar soil respond to having a plant growing in them, with the added water and nutrients? Will adding water make the mineralogy more hospitable to plants?” asked another scientist, Stephen Elardo, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Florida.

“We wanted to do this experiment because, for years, we asked ourselves this question: Would plants grow in lunar soil?” Ferl said. “It turns out the answer is yes.”