Dutch Researchers Grow Crops In Simulated Lunar and Martian Soil (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington writes: When people start living on the moon and Mars on a permanent basis, they are going to need to grow their own crops to produce food to eat. Indeed, in the recent hit movie, "The Martian," Matt Damon's character grew potatoes to survive long enough to be rescued. With that in mind, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have been trying to grow crops in simulated lunar and Martian soil. The first attempt was not successful. The second, however, proved to have promising results.

Comments

Spoiler

[Ogive17]

Thank you for ruining the end of the movie for me!

Huh?

[Rei]

The soil simulants were provided by NASA, with the moon soil actually coming from a desert in Arizona, and the Mars soil coming from a Hawaiian volcano

Huh? What kind of lousy "simulants" are those? Is Hawaiian volcano soil rich in perchlorates? Martian regolith is oxidizing enough that if you were playing around in it with your bare skin you'd get burns; it's similar to handling undiluted lye or bleach, highly destructive to organic matter.

It's also very corrosive just from abrasion, although lunar regolith is worse. Trivia for people here: how many vacuum-sealed samples of lunar regolith do you think we have left over from the Apollo days? Answer: none. The regolith abraded the seals over time, creating pinpoint leaks; every last sample is now partially oxidized by Earth air.

Additionally, both are believed to be very hazardous in terms of silicosis risk, akin to breathing what comes off of a rock crusher (Mars's is finer, but both are in the hazardous range). Martian regolith has some other nasty chemical surprises though (beyond the perchlorates)... among the contaminants that have been identified is what appears to be significant amounts of hexavalent chromium. That's the type of chromium almost never found in nature on Earth (because we live in an oxidizing environment) that's extremely toxic to people (think Erin Brockovich).

This isn't just Earth soil; it's a totally different beast.

Anyway, I'm not that big of a Mars fan... I'll take a colony on Venus any day over one on Mars. ;)