After years of experimentation, scientists successfully grow plants in lunar soil – a first in human history and a major victory in global space exploration.
- Main takeaways
- The plant was the Arabidopsis plant — a small flowering plant native to Eurasia/Africa
- The lunar soil was from the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions
- This landmark discovery may mean it’s possible to use the moon as a halfway point between Earth and Mars for missions
- It took scientists over 11 years to be granted permission to work with the soil
In a new paper published in the journal “Communications Biology,” University of Florida researchers showed that plants can successfully sprout and grow in lunar soil. This study, which also investigated how plants respond biologically to the moon’s soil, is a landmark discovery in scientific history and proves revolutionary in the possibilities for future exploration.
What this means for space travel
This work in practical application proves that plants can potentially be grown on the moon for food and oxygen during space missions. More immediately, this research benefits the Artemis Program, which plans to return humans to the moon by 2024 in preparation for human missions to Mars.
“Artemis will require a better understanding of how to grow plants in space,” said Rob Ferl, one of the study’s authors and professor of horticultural sciences at the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). If plants are able to grow on the moon, it may be possible to use the moon as a halfway point between Earth and Mars for longer missions.
“For future, longer space missions, we may use the moon as a hub or launching pad. It makes sense that we would want to use the soil that’s already there to grow plants,” Ferl said. “So, what happens when you grow plants in lunar soil, something that is totally outside of a plant’s evolutionary experience? What would plants do in a lunar greenhouse? Could we have lunar farmers?”
Plants have been used in lunar research before, added Anna-Lisa Paul, another of the study’s authors and a research professor of horticultural sciences in UF/IFAS.
“[Previously] Plants helped establish that the soil samples brought back from the moon did not harbor pathogens or other unknown components that would harm terrestrial life, but those plants were only dusted with the lunar regolith and were never actually grown in it,” Paul said.
Paul and Ferl took the leap with a simple experiment to see if plants would sprout in lunar soil. With only a few teaspoons of lunar soil collected from the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions, they used thimble-sized wells as “pots” and moistened the soil with a nutrient solution to grow Arabidopsis plants.
Meet the Arabidopsis plants
Arabidopsis is widely used in the plant sciences because its genetic code has been fully mapped. Growing Arabidopsis in the lunar soil allowed the researchers more insight into how the soil affected the plants, down to the level of gene expression.
It took over 11 years for the researchers to be granted permission to work with the soil, given its extremely limited quantity and highly experimental nature of the research. However, their resounding success has changed the fate of space exploration permanently.
“We were amazed. We did not predict that,” Paul said. “That told us that the lunar soils didn’t interrupt the hormones and signals involved in plant germination.”
UF is conducting ongoing research in relation to the Artemis program. With incredible discoveries like this, successful human missions to Mars may in our near future.
“We wanted to do this experiment because, for years, we were asking this question: Would plants grow in lunar soil,” Ferl said. “The answer, it turns out, is yes.”
