14 ms·

Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith

158 points by perihelions 5y ago

stuff4ben 5y ago
So just plain regolith was used? I wonder if it was augmented by fertilizer how much of a difference it would make (a la The Martian)?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gwill 5y ago
  "Each well contained 900 mg of regolith material layered over a 0.45-micron filter and Rockwool wick and was sown with 3-5 Arabidopsis seeds suspended in water" looks like it was as true to the source as possible. wish they had another 12 grams to test with fertilizer.
  - lathyrus_long 5y ago
    They applied "nutrient solution of 0.125× strength MS nutrient solution, pH 5.7 (Murashige and Skoog)". The salts in that make a typical complete hydroponic fertilizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashige_and_Skoog_medium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashige_and_Skoog_medium
    - gwill 5y ago
      oh shoot, my bad. if that was in the article i missed it.
- kataklasm 5y ago
  A few years ago I was writing a (semi-)scientific paper ("Seminarfacharbeit") with two other students as part of the high school graduation process (Abitur) in Germany. The general topic was water and air recycling/purification and plant nurturing for long duration space trips such as a trip to Mars. In the course of writing the paper we had access to a Mars regolith simulant with a very analogous chemical composition to real Mars regolith. We experimented with growing tomatoes, soybeans, radish, spinach and some salad variant I don't remember the name of, each with and without fertilizer. We did'nt have a lot of time and not enough regolith simulant to get significant results, but after a month tomatoes, soybeans and radish showed large growth, with sprout shoots of up to 20cm. We also controlled lighting to be more similar to Mars, although there isn't much difference in daytime lengths. Unfortunately we weren't able to control the atmosphere to be similar to Mars atmosphere, so take our results with a grain of salt.
  - tagami 5y ago
    Grain of salt is an interesting comment as most regolith simulants do not include the perchlorates
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  I'm guessing that they would have added some simple nutrients and tried with plants you would find in e.g. deserts that are used to grow in very low quality soil. Over time, you could probably make the soil richer simply by supplying simple nutrients and chemicals and letting nature do its thing. The importance of that is that there would be no need to transport many tonnes of earth soil. Though using some of that would probably help bootstrap soil production. Chemical fertilizers are mainly produced using simple chemicals (hydrogen, ammonia, phosphates, etc. So, you could see that happening on e.g. Mars which probably has most of what you'd need in some form. I guess the Moon would be more challenging as it has no atmosphere and lacks elements like nitrogen and carbon.
yborg 5y ago
What surprised me the most about this story is that apparently nobody tried this obvious experiment in the last 50 years. It seems basic to supporting a settlement on the Moon.
- Karawebnetwork 5y ago
  My understanding is that we have only a small sample and growing things in it would ruin it for a lot of experiments.
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    These have got to be the most expensive flowers in history.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      I dunno, inflation has really hit weed prices lately.
    - lobocinza 5y ago
      More than Tulips?
      - 8organicbits 5y ago
        Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania > a Viceroy Tulip was worth upwards of five times the cost of an average house at the time.
  - noselasd 5y ago
    We do have 382 kilograms of lunar samples returned form the apollo missions - not sure how much of that is regolith though
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago
rich_sasha 5y ago
Amazing. I wonder if other plant species are better suited to growing in Lunar “soil”. Just like on Earth plants prefer one type of soil to another.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Interestingly ionic stresses on plants is not a problem unique to the moon - There are plenty of places on earth where(relative to typ. earth soil) high salinity soils exist : https://www.agriculture.com/crops/cover-crops/new-life-for-saline-soil https://www.agriculture.com/crops/cover-crops/new-life-for-s... With a little bit of selective breeding and genetic manipulation moon diets might include a lot of specialized barley and sugar beets!
  - s0rce 5y ago
    Salicornia do really well in salty marshy areas and are edible!
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    I'm picturing the solar system's first batch of actual moonshine.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      Which for that very reason is a feature in every single piece of space-based sci-fi ever
- Maciek416 5y ago
  At least _prior_ to knowing anything else about regolith, aside from it sometimes having volcanic origins: Speaking as a person who grows a wide variety of woody tree species (pines, maples, junipers, cottonwoods, azaleas, etc) in inorganic substrates like pure perlite, pure lava, pure pumice (+combinations of those and other volcanic media), and has seen all of these tree species happily send roots into things like IKEA astroturf or blocks of Rockwool, it doesn't surprise me that regolith could maybe work as a grow media.
m348e912 5y ago
- cookingrobot 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apo...
  - georgia_peach 5y ago
  - georgia_peach 5y ago
    Will also note the disproportionate "mystery school" involvement here: http://pubs.royle.com/publication/?i=616651&article_id=3471314&view=articleBrowser&ver=html5 http://pubs.royle.com/publication/?i=616651&article_id=34713...
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Remarkable. I guess some of the old timey tinfoil hat theories are still around. If the Americans didn't put the LLR on the moon who did? I think you'll find it difficult to suggest that it's naturally occurring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
  - zardo 5y ago
    The moon landings were faked, but they faked them on site.
    - jl6 5y ago
      Apollos 1-10 landed on the moon to properly scope it out so they could be sure the faked Apollo 11 would look realistic.
      - 5y ago
nomercy400 5y ago
Any reason they picked this specific plant?
- siver_john 5y ago
  It is often a model organism in plant studies, similar to mice in drug discovery. Mostly because it has a quick growth time, is fairly hardy, and just the fact it has been so well studied means that a lot is known about it. I am not a plant biologist but have talked to some and I've often seen it used in their work and this was their given reasons.
  - jdale27 5y ago
    This is all true, plus as the sibling post mentioned its small genome size. The complete genome sequence is about 125 million base pairs, coincidentally around the same size as the other model organisms Drosophila and C. elegans, and only about 10x larger than brewer's yeast (S. cerevisiae). Interestingly I'm not sure if this was known when they started using it, since IIRC Arabidopsis was commonly used even before DNA was confirmed to be the genetic material in the 1940s. I worked in one of the labs that did the original sequencing and annotation of the Arabidopsis genome, and I can confirm that it was useful to be able to open the complete genome sequence file in an Emacs buffer without my Sun pizza box workstation breaking a sweat.
- rzzzt 5y ago
  Wikipedia says its small genome and short "cycle time" makes it an excellent test subject for various experiments. A photo depicts it growing in sidewalk cracks. Maybe they'll pick an orchid next time!
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > Maybe they'll pick an orchid next time! I feel an Axiom of Choice joke in there somewhere, for the botany + set theory geeks out there...
- transcriptase 5y ago
georgia_peach 5y ago
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  I am just checking but are you saying that you do not think Nasa landed 12 astronaunts on the moon from 1969-71? (The Peenemunde boys refers to von Braun - https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/peenemunde.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/peenemunde.htm)
  - georgia_peach 5y ago
    > I have difficulty believing
    - macintux 5y ago
      It would have been harder (impossible) to fake it than to make it. http://theconversation.com/moon-landings-footage-would-have-been-impossible-to-fake-a-film-expert-explains-why-118426 http://theconversation.com/moon-landings-footage-would-have-...
whatrocks 5y ago
This is cool to see, especially because I've been thinking about life on the Moon quite a bit this week (aka reading the Wikipedia article about the 2019 Beresheet lunar lander crash with those sturdy little tardigrades onboard). One article led to another, as they do, and I ended up writing a weird short story about life on the Moon a few days ago: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/plastic-man-on-the-moon/ https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/plastic-man-on-the...
dehrmann 5y ago
Only vaguely related, but it'd be interesting if NASA engineered a self-contained terrarium-like ecosystem, put it in orbit, and watched what happens.
- dTal 5y ago
  No need to put it in orbit. A self-sustaining sealed ecosystem is a vital piece of research and engineering for us to do before we leave the planet.
  - dhruval 5y ago
    The failed Biosphere 2 project was one such attempt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
    - dTal 5y ago
      I always found it odd that such an important line of research was restricted to one-off stunts like this. Every university should be making sealed gardens.

158 points by perihelions 5y ago

So just plain regolith was used? I wonder if it was augmented by fertilizer how much of a difference it would make (a la The Martian)?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gwill 5y ago
"Each well contained 900 mg of regolith material layered over a 0.45-micron filter and Rockwool wick and was sown with 3-5 Arabidopsis seeds suspended in water" looks like it was as true to the source as possible. wish they had another 12 grams to test with fertilizer.
- lathyrus_long 5y ago
  They applied "nutrient solution of 0.125× strength MS nutrient solution, pH 5.7 (Murashige and Skoog)". The salts in that make a typical complete hydroponic fertilizer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashige_and_Skoog_medium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashige_and_Skoog_medium
  - gwill 5y ago
    oh shoot, my bad. if that was in the article i missed it.
kataklasm 5y ago
A few years ago I was writing a (semi-)scientific paper ("Seminarfacharbeit") with two other students as part of the high school graduation process (Abitur) in Germany. The general topic was water and air recycling/purification and plant nurturing for long duration space trips such as a trip to Mars. In the course of writing the paper we had access to a Mars regolith simulant with a very analogous chemical composition to real Mars regolith. We experimented with growing tomatoes, soybeans, radish, spinach and some salad variant I don't remember the name of, each with and without fertilizer. We did'nt have a lot of time and not enough regolith simulant to get significant results, but after a month tomatoes, soybeans and radish showed large growth, with sprout shoots of up to 20cm. We also controlled lighting to be more similar to Mars, although there isn't much difference in daytime lengths. Unfortunately we weren't able to control the atmosphere to be similar to Mars atmosphere, so take our results with a grain of salt.
- tagami 5y ago
  Grain of salt is an interesting comment as most regolith simulants do not include the perchlorates
jillesvangurp 5y ago
I'm guessing that they would have added some simple nutrients and tried with plants you would find in e.g. deserts that are used to grow in very low quality soil. Over time, you could probably make the soil richer simply by supplying simple nutrients and chemicals and letting nature do its thing. The importance of that is that there would be no need to transport many tonnes of earth soil. Though using some of that would probably help bootstrap soil production. Chemical fertilizers are mainly produced using simple chemicals (hydrogen, ammonia, phosphates, etc. So, you could see that happening on e.g. Mars which probably has most of what you'd need in some form. I guess the Moon would be more challenging as it has no atmosphere and lacks elements like nitrogen and carbon.

yborg 5y ago

What surprised me the most about this story is that apparently nobody tried this obvious experiment in the last 50 years. It seems basic to supporting a settlement on the Moon.

Karawebnetwork 5y ago
My understanding is that we have only a small sample and growing things in it would ruin it for a lot of experiments.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  These have got to be the most expensive flowers in history.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    I dunno, inflation has really hit weed prices lately.
  - lobocinza 5y ago
    More than Tulips?
    - 8organicbits 5y ago
      Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania > a Viceroy Tulip was worth upwards of five times the cost of an average house at the time.
- noselasd 5y ago
  We do have 382 kilograms of lunar samples returned form the apollo missions - not sure how much of that is regolith though
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
5y ago

rich_sasha 5y ago

Amazing. I wonder if other plant species are better suited to growing in Lunar “soil”. Just like on Earth plants prefer one type of soil to another.

idiotsecant 5y ago
Interestingly ionic stresses on plants is not a problem unique to the moon - There are plenty of places on earth where(relative to typ. earth soil) high salinity soils exist : https://www.agriculture.com/crops/cover-crops/new-life-for-saline-soil https://www.agriculture.com/crops/cover-crops/new-life-for-s... With a little bit of selective breeding and genetic manipulation moon diets might include a lot of specialized barley and sugar beets!
- s0rce 5y ago
  Salicornia do really well in salty marshy areas and are edible!
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  I'm picturing the solar system's first batch of actual moonshine.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    Which for that very reason is a feature in every single piece of space-based sci-fi ever
Maciek416 5y ago
At least _prior_ to knowing anything else about regolith, aside from it sometimes having volcanic origins: Speaking as a person who grows a wide variety of woody tree species (pines, maples, junipers, cottonwoods, azaleas, etc) in inorganic substrates like pure perlite, pure lava, pure pumice (+combinations of those and other volcanic media), and has seen all of these tree species happily send roots into things like IKEA astroturf or blocks of Rockwool, it doesn't surprise me that regolith could maybe work as a grow media.

m348e912 5y ago

cookingrobot 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apo...
- georgia_peach 5y ago
- georgia_peach 5y ago
  Will also note the disproportionate "mystery school" involvement here: http://pubs.royle.com/publication/?i=616651&article_id=3471314&view=articleBrowser&ver=html5 http://pubs.royle.com/publication/?i=616651&article_id=34713...
idiotsecant 5y ago
Remarkable. I guess some of the old timey tinfoil hat theories are still around. If the Americans didn't put the LLR on the moon who did? I think you'll find it difficult to suggest that it's naturally occurring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
- zardo 5y ago
  The moon landings were faked, but they faked them on site.
  - jl6 5y ago
    Apollos 1-10 landed on the moon to properly scope it out so they could be sure the faked Apollo 11 would look realistic.
    - 5y ago

nomercy400 5y ago

Any reason they picked this specific plant?

siver_john 5y ago
It is often a model organism in plant studies, similar to mice in drug discovery. Mostly because it has a quick growth time, is fairly hardy, and just the fact it has been so well studied means that a lot is known about it. I am not a plant biologist but have talked to some and I've often seen it used in their work and this was their given reasons.
- jdale27 5y ago
  This is all true, plus as the sibling post mentioned its small genome size. The complete genome sequence is about 125 million base pairs, coincidentally around the same size as the other model organisms Drosophila and C. elegans, and only about 10x larger than brewer's yeast (S. cerevisiae). Interestingly I'm not sure if this was known when they started using it, since IIRC Arabidopsis was commonly used even before DNA was confirmed to be the genetic material in the 1940s. I worked in one of the labs that did the original sequencing and annotation of the Arabidopsis genome, and I can confirm that it was useful to be able to open the complete genome sequence file in an Emacs buffer without my Sun pizza box workstation breaking a sweat.
rzzzt 5y ago
Wikipedia says its small genome and short "cycle time" makes it an excellent test subject for various experiments. A photo depicts it growing in sidewalk cracks. Maybe they'll pick an orchid next time!
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > Maybe they'll pick an orchid next time! I feel an Axiom of Choice joke in there somewhere, for the botany + set theory geeks out there...
transcriptase 5y ago

georgia_peach 5y ago

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I am just checking but are you saying that you do not think Nasa landed 12 astronaunts on the moon from 1969-71? (The Peenemunde boys refers to von Braun - https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/peenemunde.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/peenemunde.htm)
- georgia_peach 5y ago
  > I have difficulty believing
  - macintux 5y ago
    It would have been harder (impossible) to fake it than to make it. http://theconversation.com/moon-landings-footage-would-have-been-impossible-to-fake-a-film-expert-explains-why-118426 http://theconversation.com/moon-landings-footage-would-have-...

whatrocks 5y ago

This is cool to see, especially because I've been thinking about life on the Moon quite a bit this week (aka reading the Wikipedia article about the 2019 Beresheet lunar lander crash with those sturdy little tardigrades onboard). One article led to another, as they do, and I ended up writing a weird short story about life on the Moon a few days ago: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/plastic-man-on-the-moon/ https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/plastic-man-on-the...

dehrmann 5y ago

Only vaguely related, but it'd be interesting if NASA engineered a self-contained terrarium-like ecosystem, put it in orbit, and watched what happens.

dTal 5y ago
No need to put it in orbit. A self-sustaining sealed ecosystem is a vital piece of research and engineering for us to do before we leave the planet.
- dhruval 5y ago
  The failed Biosphere 2 project was one such attempt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
  - dTal 5y ago
    I always found it odd that such an important line of research was restricted to one-off stunts like this. Every university should be making sealed gardens.