NASA's Next Frontier: Growing Plants On the Moon 193
An anonymous reader writes in with news about a NASA project that aims to grow plants on the moon in specially made containers. "In 2015, NASA will attempt to make history by growing plants on the Moon. If they are successful, it will be the first time humans have ever brought life to another planetary body. The Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team, a group of NASA scientists, contractors, students and volunteers, is finally bringing to life an idea that has been discussed and debated for decades. They will try to grow arabidopsis, basil, sunflowers, and turnips in coffee-can-sized aluminum cylinders that will serve as plant habitats. But these are no ordinary containers – they’re packed to the brim with cameras, sensors, and electronics that will allow the team to receive image broadcasts of the plants as they grow. These habitats will have to be able to successfully regulate their own temperature, water intake, and power supply in order to brave the harsh lunar climate."
As exciting as... (Score:5, Funny)
Careful what you ask for (Score:3)
Those majestic plants 'braving the harsh lunar climate'.
You just might end up with something like this [youtube.com].
Weed and Dandilions (Score:4, Funny)
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They should plant weed and dandelions. It will grow anywhere.
Sure, but what would that prove about the ability to grow normal plants on the moon?
I think they should plant triffids. Relieve the boredom of future dwellers who'll be living in tiny glass bubbles.
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Don't forget Kudzu.
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Well, considering the relative weight of seeds versus the weight of the final product, as well as the cost of getting things up versus getting things down, this might stand a chance of being profitable...
If it heats up too much on the way into the atmosphere, the headlines won't be about greenhouse gases provoking global warming anymore ;-)
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From the NY Times: "DUUUUUUUuuuuuuude!"
Re:As exciting as... (Score:5, Funny)
Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok this is awesome.
Its been on my wishlist for unmanned travel that we'd try packaging up Earth plants and sending them to grow on alien worlds in some way. The Moon is a good starting point - Elon Musk got into SpaceX because he wanted to do it on Mars with a Greenhouse.
Personally I wish we'd just man up and shoot the appropriate organisms into Venus' atmosphere to start the terraforming process.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Personally I wish we'd just man up and shoot the appropriate organisms into Venus' atmosphere to start the terraforming process.
I agree.
And as appropriate organisms, my vote goes for: Lawyers, politicians and lobbyists, in that order.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest that we put lobbyists before politicians on that list, otherwise we will end up with a brief period where we have lobbyists with no natural target, that could be ugly.
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Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
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What about the phone sanitisers?
(http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham)
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Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
And as appropriate organisms, my vote goes for: Lawyers, politicians and lobbyists, in that order.
They'll need clergy to minister to their spiritual needs...
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J
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How do you terraform a planet which has lost most of its hydrogen to space? The water's got to come from somewhere.
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You collect large amounts of H20 or frozen H2 somewhere in the solar system. Since it's frozen, you only need to give it a bump once to set it on a collision course with the planet, where it will rain down in gigantic torrents.
Admittedly, I've just made this up and have no clue. Would this work in principle?
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I think the trick would be keeping it raining down faster than the existing processes would drive it off into space, although that's probably a given if you want to finish the process in a nongeological timescale anyway.
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Dropping one of the larger water-ice bearing rocks onto a dead planet doesn't have to be done slowly at all.
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I was more worried about finding the ice and bringing it to its destination as the rate-limiting step.
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You collect large amounts of H20 or frozen H2 somewhere in the solar system. Since it's frozen, you only need to give it a bump once to set it on a collision course with the planet, where it will rain down in gigantic torrents.
Well, not all sources are frozen. All of our problems would be solved if we could just bump the Sun into Venus. Brilliant!
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That is not the main problem. From wikipedia: Most planets also rotate on their axis in an anti-clockwise direction, but Venus rotates clockwise (called "retrograde" rotation) once every 243 Earth daysâ"the slowest rotation period of any planet. A Venusian sidereal day thus lasts longer than a Venusian year. ... storms,
Just like our moon, the Venus "day" is very very long and like that is the Venus night. I doubt a planet like this, even with a breathable atmosphere is habitable for humans. (Weather
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It would have to travel 4 miles an hour over every possible type of terrain. Better to just live in orbit.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
It would have to travel 4 miles an hour over every possible type of terrain. Better to just live in orbit.
Or just skip the terraforming and live in huge floating bubble-cities. An Earth-standard atmosphere turns out to be a lifting gas in Venus's atmosphere, and there's a region of Venus's atmosphere where both pressure and temperature are confortably Earth-like, and it's got nice steady winds to carry your bubble around the planet much faster than the surface rotation -- depends on latitude, but on the order of 100 hours.
"All" you need is to engineer a nearly-closed biosphere (same as needed for long-term orbiting habitats), and the ability to synthesize the needed inputs from Venusian atmosphere. (In contrast to space habitats, where there's no resources with zero transport costs, but low-energy transfers permit resources from a wide range of places with nearly-uniform transport costs, floating colonies give you access to the upper atmosphere for free, decreasing altitude with increasing cost, the surface with insane difficulty and cost, and orbital (or higher) space at costs similar to those for accessing LEO from Earth's surface.)
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How do you terraform a planet which has lost most of its hydrogen to space? The water's got to come from somewhere.
Just leave it to Toyota. They'll think of something, really hard.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Informative)
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Personally I wish we'd just man up and shoot the appropriate organisms into Venus' atmosphere to start the terraforming process.
I wonder how easy it would be to create a super-thin reflective film [wikipedia.org] at L1 on Venus to drop the sun's contribution below a certain threshold and let some of the atmosphere condense to the ground (hopefully the sulfuric acid part) and drop in pressure in the process. If you can send a few tons of base material and a manufacturing satellite... Of course the Venusians might object to that global cooling.
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but the problem is you're talking huge expense and several hundred human generations before the desired effect would take place, and probably several hundred more generations before the planet could sustain any kind of life.
Several hundred human generations is only a few thousand years. It's not a particularly long time. Plus, you're exaggerating the first problem. Even worse case calculations indicate that the Venus atmosphere would freeze out in a few centuries.
Reading comments on any CBC news story even remotely related to climate change has made me lose all hope for humanity. We're doomed whether we do something or not. Even if we did manage to reverse, or mitigate, climate change there's just too much stupid to believe we'd continue on as a species for much longer. I give it maybe two more generations before we forget how to breath and people start dying of asphyxiation syndrome.
I see you're doing your part to contribute by hyperventilating about "climate change". Let us not forget the third strategy for "climate change", adaptation.
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I see you're doing your part to contribute by hyperventilating...
This is exactly the reason we can't have nice things. I say, "hay, you know if we switched to solar or wind power we could save money in the long run and as a bonus it would be good for
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Several implies more than three, so yes a minimum of 3,000 would fit in there, but I was implying it would take an arbitrarily long time.
Which isn't that long as I noted. A few centuries to millennia and the end result could be a second Earth which sticks around being useful for a few tens of millions of years.
I say, "hay, you know if we switched to solar or wind power we could save money in the long run and as a bonus it would be good for the environment" and I'm accused of hyperventilating.
Because your claim was exaggerated and you followed it with the hyperbole that people would forget how to breathe merely because they don't buy into a belief system that isn't founded on reality.
You mean like switching to sustainable energy sources?
Something we can do even easier in a few decades than we can do now.
or perhaps cutting down on air pollution that's causing smog in large cities leading to increases in lung diseases like cancer and asthma?
Already been done. Pollution was much worse in the 50s.
or perhaps reducing the number of accidents while extracting and transporting dangerous toxic liquid (oil) that's lead to huge issues in fishing and agricultural industries?
Yes, already done.
How are things going down there in the Gulf of Mexico by the way?
T
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Of course the Venusians might object to that global cooling.
Screw 'em, those damned nasty Venusians [mcgrewbooks.com] want to kill us all anyway.
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Personally I wish we'd just man up and shoot the appropriate organisms into Venus' atmosphere to start the terraforming process.
Because breathable Earth-normal atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, we could make a relatively low budget colony without any terraforming. Just send a big balloon. It could ride the relatively stable upper atmospheric winds on Venus, circling the planet every 4 earth days, and be at standard pressure, so any hull breach would not result in explosive decompression.
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Agreed, but we need to make sure there's no such thing as Venusian life first.
I knew it. (Score:4, Funny)
...it will be the first time humans have ever brought life to another planetary body.
So NASA is finally admitting that it never sent life [Astronauts] to another planetary body. Am guessing they may have sent dead ones in order to be able truthfully say yes we sent astronauts to the moon.
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Yes, that is exactly it. If we ignore the technicality that no life ever touched another planetary body on purpose, you'd be spot on. Spacesuits and shit be damned, let's mangle reality to fit our agenda. Go, go gadget tinfoil hat - DEPLOY!
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they're going to grow them on the moon soil?
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You know what this means? Buzz Aldrin's secretly a zombie! (Lest one wonder why he punched that moon landing denier instead of feasting on his brains, the denier's brain was just too small to bother with.)
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Non SI units (Score:5, Insightful)
The "coffee can" is a US unit unknown to the rest of the world. We buy our coffee in packets or jars (of differing sizes). How big is a coffee can?
Re:Non SI units (Score:5, Funny)
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169.56 cubic inches.
Re:Non SI units (Score:5, Interesting)
I just looked this up - to me "coffee can" meant a 180ml can of liquid coffee (around half the size of a can of coke) that's ready to drink, but apparently this isn't popular outside East Asia. According to Wikipedia, a standard coffee can, also known as a #10 can, has a volume of 13 cups and holds 3 lb of coffee. A cup is a US unit, distinct from the imperial unit of the same name, measuring 16 US tablespoons (again different from imperial tablespoons) or around 237 ml. So a coffee can is not quite 3.1 litres - slightly more than Thanshin's reply of 169.56 cubic inches (which is around 2.8 litres) but slightly less than ksemlerK's reply which comes out as 3.45 litres (unless that's the exterior dimensions?). It also seems kind of weird that the can is so big as it's also called a 3 lb coffee can, which is less than 1.5 kg and coffee is denser than water; perhaps when you open the can it's more than half empty?
Re:Non SI units (Score:5, Informative)
It's not liquid coffee, it's ground coffee beans. They're about one third of the density of water.
Re:Non SI units (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect the actual grains are more dense than water, but the powder packs inefficiently. (Instant coffee? You're a monster.)
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True, but it hasn't been calcined and ground. To the high-precision balance!
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Approximately 15cm diameter and 18cm tall can that holds about 1kg of coffee. How are they going to get a sunflower to grow in a coffee can sized space?
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if my memorey serves right the sizes are large, extra-large and bucket.
but isn't a coffee can something the coffee beans come in? like a can of baked beans?
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Here in the US some cans have coffee beans that you bring home to grind; the rest are coffee grounds ready for brewing. Refill packs can be bought in order to reuse the cans
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How big is an inch ?
0.1mm for genital measurement, 25.4mm for everything else.
How much will it cost me? (Score:2)
How much will it cost me if I want to buy one of those turnip?
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Not as much as you'd think, but it's collect only.
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Purpose? (Score:3, Interesting)
This experiment will test whether plants can survive radiation, flourish in partial gravity, and thrive in a small, controlled environment.
We can (and have) test all those things here on Earth. IIRC, NASA successfully grew lettuce in zero-g on a shuttle mission.
The moon is a terrible place to grow plants:
- 13-day/night cycle
- 275 Kelvin temperature variation
- 25 rem/yr radiation with no solar flare protection
- no water
- lunar regolith useless as soil
In other words you have to take the whole environment with you. Growing plants on a scale sufficient to be considered food on the moon is a long way off.
It makes for a good kids public outreach program, but let's be realistic: the moon is basically good for 2 things - a huge radio telescope on the far side, and the 1-50 ppb He-3 in the lunar regolith. By the time we're ready to do those things, robots will be good enough to do it all for us.
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We can (and have) test all those things here on Earth. IIRC, NASA successfully grew lettuce in zero-g on a shuttle mission.
The moon is a terrible place to grow plants:
Exactly; we have done all the tests we can on Earth, and of course nothing beats the real thing for accuracy.
Plus the only place in the solar system that isn't a terrible place to grow plants is Earth, and possibly the upper atmosphere of Venus [wikipedia.org].
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- 13-day/night cycle
- 275 Kelvin temperature variation
There are areas near the poles that have basically unending sunshine, neatly taking care of those 2 issues.
no water
Those same areas have been show to contain a surprising amount of water in the regolith, in the range of cups per cubic meter.
lunar regolith useless as soil
Soil is overrated anyway. Hydroponics (or even aeroponics) allows better production with more efficient use of resources. Of course, eventually it'd be nice to work out exactly what it will take to break down the regolith into something earth plant life can survive in; but in
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no water
Not exactly. Aside from the huge amount of water ice that can be found in the always-dark craters near the poles, there's also the regolith itself. NASA plans to mine the regolith for water [space.com].
Half the reason why a lunar space elevator makes sense is because of the tremendous value of having a source of water (and consequently hydrogen and oxygen for fuel/oxidizer) in a shallow gravity well.
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> robots will be good enough to do it all for us.
or clones of Sam Rockwell.
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Moon Pot (Score:3)
Think about it. What's needed is a really high (pun intended) profit margin product to drive space exploration. Think how much stoners would pay for pot grown on the moon. Astronomical profit!
Unlike mineral extraction, there is minimal extra-terrestrial processing involved. It's like a sample and return mission, except you don't have to find anything.
Now we can finally fill in item number two:
1) Grow pot on Moon
2) Return it to Earth.
3) Profit!
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You'd have to do it the other way around, weight 1 oz on earth and sell it as 1 oz on the moon.
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Guaranteed to get you high!
Soil (Score:2)
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Weeds first, THEN interesting plants (Score:3)
While regolith ain't soil, it can be used as a basic substrate [nih.gov] which hearty weeds wouldn't complain about.
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If you can grow crabgrass, dandelions, and kudzu, then you could grow basil and turnips instead with no substantial difference in difficulty. What's the real difference? Astronauts would rather eat basil-turnips stew than kudzu crabgrass salad. The experiment is actually somewhat needed since it'll give us better estimates on the amount of area food production will take (it depends on the growth rate of the foods).
If we're talking terraforming and not just growing goodies to eat in a mostly closed cycle
WRONG (Score:2)
ok, coffee can sized aluminum containers? Clearly you've not been reading High Times. Rather than trying to invent new ways to grow plants in confined spaces with limited resources and light, why not ask the people who've been doing it for decades?
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Maybe they don't want to get caught?
A Great Idea, Question Though (Score:2)
1st time? Who knows. (Score:2)
It think that's a very optimistic statement.
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$s/It/I/
Farmer on the moon (Score:2)
I till with a harpoon
But there ain't water
So I have my daughter
Sing this jaunty tune!
Take it Crushinator!
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I'm a farmer on the moon
I till with a harpoon
But there ain't water
So I have my daughter
Moonshine in lieu of water? Ensuing drunken incest?
Let's face it, you're actually a farmer on the Ozarks, not the Moon.
Starting with plants? (Score:2)
Damn it Jim! (Score:2)
I'm a doctor, not an gardener!
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Please seek psychiatric help. At the very least, read some books on sceptical/scientific/critical thinking and actively debate the idea that you might be experiencing delusions.
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"Please seek psychiatric help."
Please seek help in spotting cultural references. Get the hell off your computer, and step the fuck outside and pay attention.
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No water (a little ice at the poles), ridiculous temperature extremes, terrible soil, no atmosphere... must be quite a plant. That's the type of environment that would make extremophile bacteria want to head home again. The only place plants are growing on the moon is in a controlled environmental container.
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Aside from "no atmosphere" you've nicely described the Antarctic deserts. Admittedly that's a big "aside".
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Silicon provides no radiation protection.
Why would you think that? Electronics requires radiation hardening because it is small scale and delicate (especially to high energy charged particles), not because it is made of silicon.
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We've brought all manner of microscopic life with us -- much of it inside or on the surface of us -- when we were on the moon previously. Doubtless at least some amount has been sent as microscopic residue even on unmanned missions. OK, the vast majority of the lunar passengers also came back with us, and it
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Apollo 12 retrieved some equipment, a camera from Surveyor 3, from the moon and they found that some bacterium (streptococcus miti) had apparently survived (according to some liberal definition of "survived", in spore form). Nowadays they have planetary protection officers [wikipedia.org] like Catharine A. Conley to make sure that spacecraft do not contaminate other celestial bodies.
Incidentally, the planetary protection office is also responsible at NASA for the protection of earth against alien invasions, although it i
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Intentionality is implied when someone uses the word "brought" without qualification. I really doubt someone would've understood this to mean "when human beings travelled to the moon, they did so in a state of complete sterility".
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Intentionality is implied when someone uses the word "brought" without qualification.
Not at all. For example, diseases are "brought" along with human activity all the time unintentionally.
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