The last manned flight to the Moon took place in 1972 as part of Apollo 17. NASA's Artemis program should finally bring people back to the near-Earth celestial body in the 2020s. A lunar base is planned, and annual manned landings. An important question here is whether the living conditions on the Earth satellite can be improved by planting.
To test whether the moon floor can accommodate plant life, Anna-Lisa Paul, Stephen Elardo and Robert Ferl from the University of Florida copies of the field (Arabidopsis Thaliana) pulled the results in the specialist magazine »Nature Communications Biology
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The rehearsals came from the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 moon missions and consisted of Regolith.
Regolithic material is a mixture of grinding rock and frozen rock melt.
The researchers examined whether growth and gene expression of these seedlings differed from those who had grown from the earth in 16 samples of volcanic ashes.
The ashes have a similar particle size and mineral composition as moon floor.
The team showed that growth for the plants was a challenge: the mondregolith plants developed only slowly and had more stunted roots than the specimens grown in volcano ash. They also expressed genes that indicate ion stress - similar to plants to salt, metals and reactive oxygen species. Some contained reddish-black pigments-characteristics that also indicate plant stress. Ferl and his colleagues suspect that the influence of cosmic radiation and sun wind on the moon floor as well as the presence of small iron particles trigger stress reactions in the plants and impair their development.
Their experiment shows that moon floor can be used for plant cultivation and experiments, but the growth does not support as well as volcanic ash. According to the authors, the interaction between plants and mondregolith must continue to be examined in order to make the sailors usable for the planting one day.
