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

Grass

[DeBaas]

This time, however, fresh-cut grass was added to the growing medium.

Yes, we Dutch people have lot's of experience in adding grass into the mix...

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. ;)

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[Immerman]

Not really, unless you want to start a full-scale farm on day 1. You could easily bring a bit of potting soil and some seeds for fast-growing grass to get started, preferably something that can spread through the roots instead of only by seed. Trim the grass regularly to maintain maximum growth rate, and use it to enrich additional soil for the grass to spread into. It may take a while to enrich enough soil to start farming, but you're dealing with exponential growth so it will happen a lot faster than you might expect. Plan it right, and by the time you have your first pressurized greenhouse constructed you'll be ready to seed a substantial fraction of it with grass right away, and by the time you have your second greenhouse constructed you should have plenty of grass to enrich the soil immediately.

Choose your grass wisely, and it will be an effective oxygen producer while it's busy enriching your soil. Take the right grass and/or companion microbes to break down cellulose into something we can digest and you can even eat the grass while waiting for your more nutritious crops to grow. I wonder how difficult it would be to make an artificial "cow stomach" bioreactor? After all cows don't actually digest grass, they digest the microbes that digest the chewed grass.

And of course you don't actually need soil at all - you could start out growing grass hydroponically. Hydroponics has much higher infrastructure requirements that make it unattractive for large-scale usage in resource constrained environments, but a small scale facility could be a viable epicenter for staring "keystone" plant populations.

Comment

[WallyL]

So they literally scienced the shit out of it?