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[Adventurer]

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Plants 'thrive' on Moon rock diet
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Vienna



Growing plants in space will be far from easy


More details

Scientists with the European Space Agency (Esa) say the day when flowers bloom on the Moon has come closer.

An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.

Some see growing plants on the Moon as a step towards human habitation.

But the concept is not an official aim of Esa, and one of the agency's senior officials has dismissed the idea as "science fiction".

The new research was presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, the largest annual European gathering of scientists studying the Earth, its climate and its neighbours in space.

Bernard Foing, a senior scientist with the European Space Research and Technology Centre (Estec) in the Netherlands, believes growing plants on the Moon would be a useful tool to learn how life adapts to lunar conditions, and as a practical aid to establishing manned bases.

"We would bring a system of water circulation and recovery, which is also the type of system that in any case you want to develop when you are going to manufacture a primitive sort of life support system," he told BBC News.

"So it is also a kind of `technological breadboard' for maintaining a simple life form in an extreme environment."

MANONTHEMOON

[stillnotking]

Off topic, but "Bernard Foing" is a fantastic name.

[caniff]

I'm no expert, but I've heard that sub-soil conditioning is extremely important for maintaining a biosphere. Worms, for example, play a critical role in keeping soil nitrogen levels up, which is vital for plants to convert CO2 into oxygen.

The moon needs worms, dammit!

(Maybe Monsanto can create lunar-worm)

[wannago]

You all remember "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" don't you???

[Czarjorge]

Is the moon large enough to sustain even a limited nitrogen based atmosphere? I didn't think so. I don't know that terraforming the moon is feasible. Now surface/subsurface domes...

[stillnotking]

[caniff]

[stillnotking]

[Czarjorge]

And I think it's likely that we will master living in space on stations or generational ships before we can properly colonize the moon. In fact Mars will probably come first.

The moon will ultimately be Earth's space trade post. That or perhaps luxury housing if we really do muck up the planet beyond fixing.

[stillnotking]

Trouble is that generational starships have lousy ROI. It's hard to imagine why anyone would invest the resources to build one.

Our first colonies will be wherever the economically useful resources happen to be.

[mithridates]

The moon can sustain an atmosphere. It does get blown away by the solar wind but that's over a long period of time, and over the short term (though I forget exactly how short term, thousands of years I think) it could retain an atmosphere. What kind of atmosphere is the question though - if you want a quick and dirty atmosphere you can use heavier gases that also won't get blown away as easily but they're not very good for life. But if they are heavy enough then (SF6 for example) you won't need as much of them by volume to have the same atmospheric density and then when you mix in enough O2 and other needed gases then it might do the trick.

The Apollo program apparently doubled the atmosphere due to the gases from the rockets. I don't remember the source for that though.

The problem though is whether you would want an atmosphere. It's useful for us to have no atmosphere on the moon which makes it possible to build a mass driver on the surface to launch objects straight into space, whereas with an atmosphere like ours it would burn up / not make it into space. OTOH a bit of an atmosphere might be useful because whenever you're on the moon you just might get hit with a microasteroid, and even a pebble could kill someone or destroy something valuable. Having a tiny atmosphere would help against this.

Having a tiny atmosphere as well would help to change the dust on the moon, which seems to be good for plants according to the article but the dust itself is still extremely sharp, unlike the dust on the Earth. The dust here is like those pieces of glass you see on the beach that have been worn down, but on the Moon they're still extremely sharp and they're a hazard as well. Even a small atmosphere though would cause them to shift around and that would be a good thing.

So I think there's a magic amount of atmosphere that would actually be good for us, though I don't know exactly how much. Maybe something a bit under the atmospheric density of Mars? Enough to have some convection and protection from scary pebbles but still low enough that you can take advantage of a near-airless environment.

[mithridates]

[Czarjorge]

They'll all be steps. I do think Mars will be first though. There's been so much invested in theorizing how to go about colonizing Mars. And creating an atmosphere on Mars will be relatively easy if we don't want to maintain the surface of the planet in its current state.

[Pligganease]

[mithridates]