Lunar samples brought back from the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions have been used as soil to grow plants, which were a bit stunted compared to plants grown in Earth’s soil
After 20 days, the team harvested the plants and analysed their gene activity. The plants grown in lunar soil had higher activity in genes that help cope with stressful conditions.
“The primary reason that plants… presented such stress-related responses is that lunar regolith is quite different from the terrestrial [soil], it’s very low in carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous… nutrients that plants need. Lunar regolith is also very powdery and fine-grained… but the fragments are very sharp and angular.
“We could mitigate that by carefully choosing where we mine for materials to grow plants [on the moon],” said Paul. However, we wouldn’t get much nutrition from eating thale cress plants. “As for useability of human life support, [thale cress] is not a good candidate; it’s too small to produce meaningful biomass,” saysfrom Earth can grow in lunar soil, said Paul.at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Space in Norway. “We need to know if and how we can utilise the resources [on the moon] as well as optimise plant cultivation techniques.
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