Growing Plants on the Moon May Be Feasible

Smivs writes "European scientists say that growing plants on the moon should be possible. Scientists in the Netherlands believe growing plants on our sister satellite would be useful as a tool to learn how life adapts to lunar conditions. It would also aid in understanding the challenges that might be faced by manned bases. 'The new step, taken in the experiments reported at the EGU, is to remove the need for bringing nutrients and soil from Earth. A team led by Natasha Kozyrovska and Iryna Zaetz from the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev planted marigolds in crushed anorthosite, a type of rock found on Earth which is very similar to much of the lunar surface. In neat anorthosite, the plants fared very badly. But adding different types of bacteria made them thrive; the bacteria appeared to draw elements from the rock that the plants needed, such as potassium.'"

Comments

Re:Air?

[dpilot]

Predating "Red Mars" (and even predating "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") by a few years, Robert Heinlein wrote "Farmer in the Sky". In it he went into goodly detail about what it would take to turn bare rock into fertile soil, including earthworms and composting all of your biological waste. He had the Ganymede colony under a dome, though it was at reduced pressure.

A friend who had also read "Farmer..." said that he'd been to Hawaii and seen their process of recovering lava fields to soil, and felt that Heinlein was right in the same ballpark, and least with the rock-crushing side of things. Obviously in a place like Hawaii it would be harder to keep life out than to start it up.

Re:Air?

[vtscott]

Just like you, plants require oxygen from the air to metabolize their food (in their case the sugars they produce from photosynthesis). If they had no oxygen, they couldn't perform plant respiration. Plants don't store oxygen from photosynthesis internally so they rely on being able to pull oxygen from the air when they need it. Of course, overall plants produce more oxygen through photosynthesis than they use through respiration, so if we put these moon plants in some kind of dome they'd not die from lack of oxygen.

Re:Air?

[hey!]

In other words, they can build a big terrarium.

Here's something to consider. If you have ever maintained an aquarium, you probably know that despite what common sense would tell you, the larger the aquarium is, the easier it is to keep going. True, things like water changes become logistically harder as the tank sizes get to the enormous ranges, but you build around that.

The tricky thing about small aquariums is that the chemistry can change rapidly in a small volume of water. You've got to watch a 5 gallon tank like a hawk for things like spikes in ammonia or shifts in pH. A 50 gallon tank is quite easy for a beginner to maintain, apart from having to lug buckets of water around. If you heater goes out, or worse if it get stuck on, you're fish are dead if you don't notice it right away. In a fifty gallon tank you've got some slack.

The logical end goal of growing plants on the Moon would be to set up a system in which the plants, given a carefully controlled start, establish an environment that achieves equilibrium without putting more resources into it. Naturally, the larger the environment is, the easier it would be to do this. Once you have established how much space you need to reach a moderately stable equilibrium, let's say it's a thousand cubic meters, you can build larger examples that actually resist moving away from their equilibrium point.

The thing about systems in equilibrium, as any chemical engineer will tell you, is that when you take something that is part of the equilibrium out, they respond by making more of it.

Which is just what you need to have an efficient, self sustaining environment on the Moon. Or the Earth, for that matter.