For The First Time, Scientists Have Grown Plants in Moon Dirt. It Didn't Go Great

When the Artemis program returns humans to the Moon in a few years, there are a lot of logistical issues that need to be addressed.

The issue of food is not least. Space agencies involved in the International Space Station provide pre-packed provisions, but there are advantages to having access to fresh food.

It would be amazing if lunar soil could be used to grow fresh crops. A team of scientists used a few grams of lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions to attempt to grow plants.

We may use the Moon as a launching pad in the future. Rob Ferl of the University of Florida says that it makes sense to use the soil that already exists to grow plants.

What happens when you grow plants in lunar soil, something that is completely outside of a plant's evolutionary experience? In a greenhouse, what would plants do? Could we have lunar farmers?

Moon dirt, also known as lunar regolith, is not great at growing plants. This research is the first step towards growing plants on the Moon in a future where plants are grown on other planets.

The current quantity of lunar sample material is very small, and therefore very valuable.

Ferl and his colleagues, Anna-Lisa Paul and Stephen Elardo, were granted a loan of just 12 grams of the precious stuff after three applications made over 11 years.

This necessitated a very small, very tight experiment. They divided their samples into smaller pots, each with a few seeds, and added a nutrient solution.

Control groups of seeds were planted in soil from extreme environments and soil simulants were used to mimic extraterrestrial soils.

The team used a Mars soil and a lunar soil for the experiment. Plants can grow well in both types of simulant, but subtle differences could mean the real thing is a different story.

Paul and his team wrote Communications Biology.

Plants are growing in the lunar soil and the soil simulant.

That seems to be the case. The researchers were surprised that most of the seeds planted in the lunar samples sprouted. The plants grown in the lunar simulant seemed to be larger and more varied in size than the seedlings.

The team found out why when they took the plants out for genetic analysis.

The plants were pulling out the tools they used to deal with stressors, such as salt and metals or oxidative stress, so we can infer that the plants perceive the lunar soil environment as stressed.

We would like to use the gene expression data to help address the stress responses to the level where plants are able to grow in lunar soil with very little impact to their health.

The lunar samples used by the researchers came from three different locations on the Moon, at different layers of depth from the surface.

This seemed to have an effect on the plants' response to the soil. One plant even died when planted in the soil closest to the surface. The layer of lunar regolith is most exposed to the sun's rays and the wind.

The results of plants grown in volcanic ash were not as good as those grown in less exposed soil. This information could help scientists figure out how to grow plants on the Moon, as well as develop ways to make the lunar soil more hospitable to plants.

We are not quite there yet. Before we can consider using Moon dirt to grow crops, we need to conduct further research on the lunar soil. Scientists now have a better idea of what they are working with and what the next steps should be.

Ferl said that they wanted to do the experiment because they had been asking if plants would grow in lunar soil.

The research has been published.