Could We Grow Crops On The Moon -- And on Mars? (smithsonianmag.com) 75
Smithsonian magazine reports on a new study that concluded it may be possible to grow agricultural crops right in the soil of Mars -- and on the moon.
For their paper in the journal Open Agriculture, researchers from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands planted ten different earthly crops in three types of soil. One was typical, garden-variety potting soil, another was simulated lunar dust, and a third was simulated Martian soil... Each Friday of the experiment, they added a nutrient-rich solution created to mimic the addition of human manure and urine that astro-colonists would likely add to their lunar farms. The crops planted in the soils included garden cress, rocket (aka arugula), tomato, radish, rye, quinoa, spinach, chives, peas and leeks.
Of those, the only vegetable that failed to grow well in the exo-soils was spinach. The radishes, cress and rye all grew to a point where seeds could be harvested. The team was also able to harvest tomatoes and peas from the lunar and Martian soils. The chives and leeks grew steadily, but slower than normal. While the quinoa produced flowers, it did not produce seeds. Still, the team reports that they suspect this is the first time any plants have been grown large enough to produce fruit in the soil simulants.
In a follow-up, the team were able to germinate the radish, cress and rye seeds produced on the Mars and lunar soils, suggesting that the production of self-sustaining crops might be possible in space.
Of those, the only vegetable that failed to grow well in the exo-soils was spinach. The radishes, cress and rye all grew to a point where seeds could be harvested. The team was also able to harvest tomatoes and peas from the lunar and Martian soils. The chives and leeks grew steadily, but slower than normal. While the quinoa produced flowers, it did not produce seeds. Still, the team reports that they suspect this is the first time any plants have been grown large enough to produce fruit in the soil simulants.
In a follow-up, the team were able to germinate the radish, cress and rye seeds produced on the Mars and lunar soils, suggesting that the production of self-sustaining crops might be possible in space.
Could we? (Score:2)
Will we? Yes, but not anytime soon.
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Will we?/quote>
The big question is . . . will astro-colonists eat it . . . ?
Each Friday of the experiment, they added a nutrient-rich solution created to mimic the addition of human manure and urine that astro-colonists would likely add to their lunar farms.
. . . that thought kinda sorta kills my appetite.
They would need to use a lot of precious water to thoroughly wash the vegetables.
Next question: Can we grow cattle for beef on the Moon . . . ?
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Dont be silly. Most of the harmful bacteria could be killed just by leaving the produce out in a less shielded part of the habitat, and letting the dangerous ionizing radiation that blasts mars's (or worse, the moon's!) surface shine on them for a few hours.
(There ARE some species that can survive that, but most of the harmful stuff can be killed that way.)
Also, wash-water can be processed and recycled the same way waste water from the toilets are. It's basically the same stuff they are washing off after
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It's called aquaponics. You grow algae to feed to fish and the fish waste feeds the plants floating on the water the fish live in and the people eat the fish and the plants and the peoples waste feeds the, digester which produces methane to burn to generate energy and heat and fertiliser to feed the algae. The plants also produce oxygen to breathe.
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It used to be called "night soil", and many Asian countries (for which read: high population density) used it as fertilizer as recently as the middle of last century, if not more recently....
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"Hippie communes" have done that here in the US within my memory, but it caused problems because they didn't bother to sterilize or compost it. In actual farming societies know enough to compost it.
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and many Asian countries used it as fertilizer as recently as the middle of last century, if not more recently....
They still do, in the villages . In China, you will not see many people eating salad. All vegetables should be cooked, just as the water needs to be boiled.
When I was a kid, we did not put raw sewerage on the crops, but the leach drain from the septic system was uphill from the home vegetable garden. I think that was normal :-)
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In rural USA we put in small sewage systems
Yes, a famous American invention. To this day, Americans are sometimes honoured by being referred to as "septic tanks"
Not just rural, they were normal in suburbia, and still linger in the suburbs of some big cities.
https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com]
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Statistically, every glass of fresh tap water contains water molecules that have been through Leonardo Da Vinci's kidneys. Or any other famous person's. Or any given animal. While we may find the natural water cycle distasteful, it's been happening for a billion years or more. If we artificially compress the cycle, that doesn't actually change it too much.
Yes, we will grow food in our own (sterilized and reprocessed) manure, and we'll drink water made from (reprocessed) urine. On the- or more properly,
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> Beef cattle will take a little longer
Or maybe never come to pass at all - between "Impossible Burger" imitation meats, and "Chicken Little" cultured meat there might be precious little demand to involve the wastefulness of cows in getting your beef fix.
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Each Friday of the experiment, they added a nutrient-rich solution created to mimic the addition of human manure and urine that astro-colonists would likely add to their lunar farms.
. . . that thought kinda sorta kills my appetite. They would need to use a lot of precious water to thoroughly wash the vegetables.
I guess you are about to go on a major diet then as the EPA approved the use of biosolids as fertilizer several years ago. "Biosolids" is the EPA term for fertilizer made from treated sewage. The last time I heard about half of all sewage in the US is now used mainly as fertilizer for agriculture. Some gets used in forests as well.
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Re:We probably could (Score:5, Informative)
No, we really couldn't.
Every so often one of these gets published (this time, in "Open Agriculture", a low-impact-factor journal). The "simulants" they're using are just sorted / processed material from Hawaiian cinder cone volcanos - for example, JSC Mars 1A is just sifted tephra from Pu'u Nene. There's nothing whatsoever done to add in, say, the highly caustic perchlorates, toxic compounds like hexavalent chromium, etc etc. Even MGS (a Mars simulant that's 20 years more modern than JSC Mars 1A), and which - unlike JSC Mars 1A - is considered to be approximately "mineralogically accurate" - still doesn't contain such chemicals.
It's nonsensical to conduct an agricultural experiment in any of these simulants without adding in the (causting, hazardous) compounds that they lack. What they've actually proven is that you can grow spinach in Hawaii.
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All agriculture on either body would have to be done in an entirely enclosed volume - that is the soil would be in raised soil beds, hydroponic media basically, but media that did not have to be shipped from Earth. What would happen if you put Martian soil, full of chlorates in it, and started circulating water through it before planting anything, exactly as you would when it is planted?
The chlorates, which are highly soluble, would leach out quickly. If the water is reclaimed - through vacuum distillation
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1. Perchlorates, not chlorates.
2. Some toxic compounds will leach well. Others won't. But the question of whether you can generate a viable substrate is different from whether something is a viable substrate. And if you're doing hydroponics, it really doesn't matter at all what you're growing things in, so long as they're inert. You can do hydroponics on a bed of plastic Elvis bobbleheads if you wanted to.
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Passive Hydroponics (Score:2)
Mars ftw (Score:3)
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I really want to know why we haven't landed on Mars yet. [smbc-comics.com] It would be such a morale booster in these divided times, even if it were fake.
We've already fake-landed on Mars -- it didn't go well [wikipedia.org].
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Of course we have landed on Mars. It is just the "getting back to earth" part which is too expensive, so we sent robots.
A one-way human mission would probably not be a "morale booster", even if they found a terminally ill person whose dream it is to visit Mars before dying.
Re: Mars ftw (Score:2)
Best of all (Score:2)
The rocket could send itself there. Very economical!
Simulated soils not chemical simulants. (Score:2)
NASA soil simulants are NOT chemical bulk composition simulants!!
They are mechanical property simulants, for testing equipment!
EG, with the reported level of perchlorate in martian soils, those plants would have died horrible deaths.
Re:Simulated soils not chemical simulants. (Score:4, Informative)
See also these fine papers about NASA's regolith simulants
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... [nasa.gov]
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... [nasa.gov]
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... [nasa.gov]
Or just browse the appropriate section of NASA's site.
https://www.nasa.gov/oem/simul... [nasa.gov]
You will find a complete and utter lack of quality simulants that cater to bulk CHEMICAL composition, rather than mechanical composition.
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I should have scrolled down - I wrote the same thing above, yet your post is a lot better referenced. :)
How on earth does something like this get past peer review? I mean, Open Agriculture has a low impact factor, but still...
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I know right?
I knew about the "Mechanical properties ONLY!" nature of the regolith simulants after looking to see if I could find a suitable simulant for thermally fused raw material experimentation (Some of the more practical considerations for a martian colony site would be utilizing available resources with minimal processing. Collecting dust would be pretty easy with cloth sails on booms, to alter the turbulence pattern of windblown dust particles, so that they pile up predictably for mechanical collect
A little aluminum will fix that (Score:2)
Just till in a little dark aluminum, light a match, and boom, no more perchlorate. And I do mean BOOM! :D
Okay, it might not be the best way to prepare rhe soil, but it sure would he fun to watch.
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Not if said aluminum foil is part of the martian habitat you are trying to grow said crops in. :P
You know, like the radiation shielding. :P
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You were joking. But for the humour-impaired, it should be noted that aluminum makes lousy radiation shielding.
On the other hand,burying your habitat in Martian dirt would work quite well for radiation shielding....
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And much more importantly, you wouldn't need to move the shielding material from Earth. (Or Mars, or Phobos, or the asteroid belt, or anywhere further than "clear that area down to bedrock to form a site for the next set of structures ; put the fines here then put the coarse grains on top."
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Chlorate and perchlorate weed killers are typically sold with about 30% w/w of sodium chloride, which is sufficient to suppress their explosive tendencies. And they're a PITA to separate. 99% of mineral grains
Re:Simulated soils not chemical simulants. (Score:4, Informative)
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Indeed. This is more what you should use nuclear power for.
(Martian atmosphere is to thin for wind generators, (or stirling engines, because there is insufficient heat transfer via convection with the atmosphere), Too dusty for efficient collection with solar, insufficient oxygen for combustion engines-- The only viable energy source is nuclear, with the thermal energy produced by the reactor being used to heat the colony, which dissipates the heat through its walls into the surrounding bedrock/regolith.)
N
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The same should apply to the moon, though solar at the poles is awesome.
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What geothermal on Mars?
That's why it doesn't have an atmosphere. You know, lack of internal convection to create a magnetic field to hold the atmosphere?
Mars appears to have been geologically active. Past tense.
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Secondly, the temperature is being determined by the New Insight Mole. It will only go down to 5 meters, but it will give us an idea of how much heat is coming from the core, and with heating, we will be able to get an idea of how much the ground conducts heat.
So, no. It is thought that geothermal is a very real possibility for mars, and BTW, the moon as well.
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The irradiance is about 1/2.3 of that on Earth. Low, but manageable, in itself - you can grow crops in the high latitudes adequately if the temperature is good.
But plants need pretty much as much radiation shielding as any other eukaryote growing actively. So you're going to need most of those several metres o
That's really not that surprising... (Score:2)
If you feed a plant all the needed nutrients with water and proper lighting the soil is just a medium for the root system to grab on to. Sure, soil is a good way to give a plant access to nutrients, but it is not the only way. I imagine as long as the medium used is similar enough to soil and not actually toxic itself to the plant, the plant would grow just fine.
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Hydroponics [wikipedia.org].
Its all a pipedream (Score:4, Insightful)
These ideas of mars or moon colonization needs to be put to rest and will cause more harm than good, because they would be a failure and would be a useless waste of resources on something that is not workable. A Big problem is temperatures. Consider that Antarctica is a paradise compared to these other objects in space. There is water everywhere, you can breath the air, there is not as much radiation, not as many perchlorates or toxic dusts, more on all of that briefly. the temperatures in Antarctica are less extreme.
You can also grow such things in soil in Antarctica and would be much easier to do than on mars or moon, problem is its just too cold there to do that. Plenty of atmosphere in those places but does not matter because heat tends to radiate and dissipate. Even if you could build a greenhouse, it would be energy intensive and the heat dissipates quickly, so its not practical. If you went underground or into insulating layers, you would not have the UV light you need for photosynthesize.
Another problem is the radiation you dont want, on the moon, it sterilizes everything. So, you would also have to go many feet underground, where you do not have the UV light you need.
Another problem is the vast supplies of hydrogen and oxygen, needed supplies, which are not quite as abundant on mars or moon. Also takes a lot of energy to make those supplies useable. None of it is sustainable due to the lack of magnetosphere. If you want to use water resources of the mars or moon, it needs to be done in a sustainable way but because each body lacks a magnetosphere, there is nothing to stop the solar wind for blowing them away.
In addition a more core problem to all of this is the lack of energy sources. Solar is weak, nuclear would be an outrageous use of resources for this pipe dream when we can't even figure out how to make this stuff work on earth. All of this stuff requires a lot of industrial processes. If we want these projects to happen they would need to be self sufficient and not require resources from earth, or else it makes problems on earth worse. This means, locally sourced energy, mining, and industrial fabrication, would all be necessary. And doing all of that is a pipe dream.
Then you have all of the perchlorates in the soil, and the fact the dust is like shards of glass that would ruin your lungs.
ll in all, its a basket case pipe dream. Its hard to come up with any plan that would not cause further resource strains on earth, which means these kinds of settlements would need to be self sufficient. if they cannot be self sufficient, its a no-go, becuase you do not want to cause more resource problems on earth than we already have.,
All of this talk of colonizing the moon or mars is sheer nonsense by people who apparently have not taken a close look at the problems and have watched too many Star Trek episodes. Its very romantic but that does not make it possible.
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Well, to be a pedant, it CAN be done, just not economically.
Throw enough energy and or resources at it, and it suddenly becomes possible.
Suitable substrates for hydroponic gardening include such pedestrian things as "river rocks" (which you could substitute with marbles. Lunar regolith contains enough alumina to be fired into a "glass"), sand, and of course, if you want to just throw money at the problem-- sodium polyacrylate water absorbing polymer [cmu.edu]
The distinction is between POSSIBLE and PRACTICAL.
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the UV light you need for photosynthesize.
Please don't pretend to speak authoritatively about things you know nothing about. Photosynthesis mostly uses the red and blue parts of the visible light spectrum. People grow plants indoors without natural light and without UV light every day.
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More or less.
Wavelength effects a lot of things.
https://www.grobo.io/blogs/gro... [grobo.io]
UV? (Score:3)
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I don't think photosynthesis requires UV light, does it? I have grown plants under High Pressure Sodium grow lights that produce little UV... or at least, little UV gets throught the glass bulb. People grow under standard flouresent lights. I am now working on growing under LED grow-lights that produce (almost?) no UV.
You are entirely correct. The UV is not beneficial to plants, except insofar as it helps control fungi — some of which are sensitive to UV. Photosynthesis is driven by red and blue light. UV and IR actually both limit photosynthesis, through heating effects. Above about 100 degrees F, plants shut their stomata to reduce water loss from respiration. Without respiration, photosynthesis cannot occur.
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Bad examples. Fluorescent lights produce UV in the tube which then interacts with phosphors coating the inside of the tube, and the phosphors fluoresce to produce visible light. Using different ranges of phosphor compounds produces the different colours of different types of tube - "warm", "daylight", etc. Some UV leaks, but not a lot.
"Blacklight" UV tube? Same technology but no (or less) phosphor coating. "Compact fluorescent" - the difference is in the size o
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Seems like it would be easily to modify the human to run on power.
To what end? (Score:1)
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Humans are capable of adjusting to the nauseating effects of being in centrifugally generated "gravity".
Being able to have access to raw materials, and most importantly, inexpensive access to water and shielding materials for the habitat, along with good access to energy sources, are vastly more pressing engineering and viability concerns than the degree of gravity on the celestial body in question. It's the logistical costs of sending everything the colony needs to stay running that's the killer.
Putting p
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Not what I said AT ALL.
I mean, SPINNING THE WHOLE DAMN HABITAT, TO CREATE ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full... [harvard.edu]
Humans are able to adapt to the different rates of acceleration they would experience inside such a spinning habitat. Contrary to many people who like to post to these kinds of stories, the disorientation and clumsiness caused by this difference in force at the head vs the feet is something humans can adapt to, and then comfortably work in.
You can have kinky sex and expect semen to
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Uhm, is your reading comprehension impaired?
The people would be inside a big spinning drum, that simulates earth gravity, at all times.
Where is that "reduced gravity" at any point during gestation?
Yeah, your assertion is nonsense, because it does not follow.
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For the latter bit, Yeah-- I agree. You only really deal with hydrostatic pressure for that. Much easier to evacuate the colonists, etc.
The major one though, is the "All eggs in single basket" argument. Say for a moment that some big nasty space rock hits the earth and boom, we are on a one-way trip to venusville.
The ocean's not gonna be so tempting then.
Vanity, Human hubris, or making the best of the available options for fault tolerance-- take your pick. All are suitable explanations.
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Incorrect. Wired [wired.com] reports that some mouse embryos did make it to healthy birth, though with a lower success rate than the control group.
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Putting people in spinning rooms is an easy problem to solve.
On the Moon or on Mars such a scheme would be a lot more like a roller coaster loop turned on its side, with a continuous line of cars going all the way around. The banked "earth" would take the load of the "cars" running on the track.
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We don't know that. Or if we do, I'd like to know how, when and where the experiments were carried out.
We do know that humans don't do well in microgravity (less than a few percent of Earth's gravity). We know that they survive perfectly well on Earth's surface at 1.0+/-0.01g . We know that they don't do too well for more than a few minutes at more than 3g.
Where have people lived for extended periods at 0.38g? There have been a variety of experiments - head-up
Why bother, power humans with electricity instead. (Score:2)
I am sure it will be far easier and more efficient to find a wetware system to convert electricity into some sort of energy source people can use. In outer space where air and raw materials are at a premium it makes far more sense.
Lets try grow on the moon first... (Score:3)
...a lot easier to pop home and grab insecticide, cat-repellant or bird-netting. You could even simulate Mars by plonking an appropriate shade cloth covering the dome. Getting the day/night cycles could be a bit more problematic. Once you've figured out what you do and don't need then run off to Mars.
Surely we can simulate Mars or the Moon here on earth? There must be a register of illumination? Open source terrarium project for the Moon & Mars? Shipping container sealed with LED lighting? Don't the pot growers have all this already?
But what about potatoes? (Score:3)
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Any desert on Earth is more hospitable (Score:1)
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Why would we use soil? (Score:1)
Some thing iâ(TM)d like to see tested (Score:2)
How does earth soil work after it has been stripped of all organics in a high temperature kiln? Is it any better than simulated regolith?
If you run a number of growing cycles with waste recycled into the substrate and seeded with soil bacteria - does it eventually turn into âoerealâ soil?