The Moon would be a harsh place to call home. It has no weather and no liquid water. And with no atmosphere to hold conditions steady, lunar temperatures can oscillate from 224 degrees Fahrenheit (107 degrees Celsius) in the daytime to –228 degrees Fahrenheit (–144 C) at night. What’s more, the surface isn’t exactly ripe for agriculture. Buzz Aldrin once described lunar regolith, akin to soil, as “talcum powder-like dust.” And researchers who’ve studied lunar soil samples have described it as glassy, metallic, and loaded with minerals that have forms not commonly found on Earth.
That’s why it is so impressive that, for the first time, scientists have successfully grown plants using lunar soil gathered from previous missions to the Moon.
A study recently published in the journal Communications Biology documents the feat. According to study author Rob Ferl, a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida, the experiment has been in the works for over a decade but researchers only carried it out last year. “Something like this takes tons of planning,” he says, because Moon soil is a finite resource and once you run out, it’s hard to come by. The team had only the equivalent of a few teaspoons to work with in a pot about the size of a thimble.
Lunar vs. terrestrial soil
In the years leading up to the experiment, researchers gathered soils from Earth that were as similar as possible to the makeup of lunar soil, says Ferl. In particular, they used soil sourced from around terrestrial craters, as well as a “lunar simulate soil” called JSC1A, an industrial mixture of chemicals meant to mimic the Moon’s soil conditions. He says getting things just right beforehand was imperative to optimizing growing conditions when the time came to plant in the real lunar soil.
The lack of a lunar atmosphere makes outdoor agriculture impossible, so researchers simulated a laboratory environment on the Moon instead. “Given conditions on the Moon, you can’t just throw seeds out on the surface and ask them to grow,” says Ferl.
He says lunar soil is different from what you might find on Earth because of the harsh solar wind and cosmic rays. Researchers found that the soil’s jagged edges and metallic minerals created suboptimal conditions for growing the Arabidopsis plant, a small flowering weed native to Europe and Asia. They chose this variety because unlike most other plants, its genes have already been mapped, making it easier to study the species’ gene expression as part of the experiment.