Scientists Find Desert Moss 'That Can Survive On Mars' (theguardian.com) 53
Scientists in China have found a species of moss that is able to withstand Mars-like conditions. The species is called Syntrichia caninervis and it's found in regions including Antarctica and the Mojave desert. The Guardian reports: "The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonization using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions," the team write. [...] Writing in the journal The Innovation, researchers in China describe how the desert moss not only survived but rapidly recovered from almost complete dehydration. It was also able to regenerate under normal growth conditions after spending up to five years at -80C and up to 30 days at -196C, and after exposure to gamma rays, with doses of around 500Gy even promoting new growth.
The team then created a set-up that had similar pressures, temperatures, gases and UV radiation to Mars. It found the moss survived in this Mars-like environment, and was able to regenerate under normal growth conditions, even after seven days of exposure. The team also noted plants that were dried before such exposure faired better. "Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space," the researchers write.
The team then created a set-up that had similar pressures, temperatures, gases and UV radiation to Mars. It found the moss survived in this Mars-like environment, and was able to regenerate under normal growth conditions, even after seven days of exposure. The team also noted plants that were dried before such exposure faired better. "Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space," the researchers write.
About that Martian soil though... (Score:3)
Re:About that Martian soil though... (Score:4, Informative)
This moss does not grow on Mars anyways, it can just be stored there for a while and then will grow again in better conditions.
Re:About that Martian soil though... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's basically a study that says, "Hey, this moss can lie dormant in very harsh conditions without dying!"
It cannot grow on Mars. It can only very slowly die there. Just much slower than most other organisms. Indeed, just to rub in the point: even ignoring the "cannot grow in Mars conditions" aspect moss reproduction fundamentally relies on rain or dew (gametes directly swim from one plant to the next) (moss reproduction is kinda cool, but that's a different topic... but TL/DR, instead of being diploid with haploid gametes, they're haploid but mate in water to form diploid reproductive structures (seta) that then grow out of the female plants and produce spores to make new haploid plants, so if you see moss with "stalks" growing out of it, that's what's going on).
Mars not only has abundant perchlorates in its regolith, but also only small amounts of fossil nitrate reserves spread fairly evenly through the regolith (due to billions of years of irradiation), the availability of which might be an even more serious problem than perchlorate toxicity in terraforming scenarios. The overwhelming majority of its nitrogen was lost to space over billions of years, and the remaining atmospheric nitrogen has a partial pressure 1/5000th that of Earth, meaning nitrogen fixing bacteria are a no-go; once any regolith nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere (which will start happening as soon as it's warm and wet), it's not going to be replaced at any relevant rate.
Life requires CHONPS. You can't built proteins or DNA without nitrogen. Plants are several percent nitrogen on a dry mass basis. I don't see how this is supposed to work.
Wrong Planet (Score:5, Interesting)
The two main issues with Venus are the difficulty of putting any robots on the surface for any length of time and the fact the delta V to orbit is almost as high as Earth's.
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Venusian, not Venetian (autocorrect, right?) Nice summary, other than that distraction.
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Venereal (the proper demonym for Venus but, because epidemiologists got there first, astronomers don't like the associations of the word) insolation (incidence of solar radiation) is only a bit less than twice that of Earth's. Not four times that. Venus' orbit is ~0.725AU, not 0.5AU. The inverse square law says that ~1.9x the insolation. Twice, not quadruple.
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Winds relative to the surface are irrelevant when you're not trying to hold position relative to the surface. What matters is turbulence. And while our level of knowledge about Venus is embarrassingly terrible compared to Mars, it *appears* to have a relatively similar turbulence profile to Earth.
While you're going to superrotate no matter what you do, you probably do want to be able to control latitude (it affects your balance between temperature and pressure, as it's cooler poleward, though lower solar
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Seems like if you were going to build a very low pressure dome that you can add moisture to, this is an ideal plant to start with. You need some kind of "starter plant" to anchor the ecosystem of fungus and bacteria, crustaceans etc that form a functional biosphere. It might not thrive unprotected on the surface, but it's certainly an interesting candidate for that sort of thing. You might have 10 years between humans visiting on mars, something like this could function as a bedrock species
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Temperatures on Mars can get as high as +20C; "The Spirit rover recorded a maximum daytime air temperature in the shade of 35 C (308 K; 95 F), and regularly recorded temperatures well above 0 C according to wikipedia. It's not impossible that there are localised places on Mars where this moss could experience viable conditions for growth for significant parts of the year.
This (Score:3)
FTA
"while the new study did not use Mars-like soil."
So in other words they omitted a component of the martian enviroment thats highly toxic to animals and plants meaning nothing could grow in the soil even if it was at earth temps and pressures.
What a pointless study.
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"You're stupid."
Ah the irony. If you're going to use pots (and the earth like soil they'll required) you might as also have a greenhouse with glass that filters UV, heaters and optionally pressurised given how you'll have transport a fuckton load of heavy soil there anyway
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While true, the less you need to add, the easier it is to do things.
Basically, this study says the moss could be dried for transport and stored in a shed for a while before using it. That makes things a LOT simpler, if not as easy as the headline tries to imply.
This isn't something to terraform Mars with. But it could still have its uses. Perhaps a low tech oxygen plant. (You'd need a lot of it per person, of course, but plants can grow.)
That said, I'm not really convinced that this is directly useful.
Re:This (Score:4, Interesting)
If they find the genes responsible for this sort of resistance they may be able to add them to other plants. If your greenhouse has some sort of not-catastrophic failure like a repairable puncture or extended interruption in water supply then you might not lose your entire setup and have to start over from scratch.
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Considering that "survival is improved by first drying" I don't think this would scale to plants that grow in larger clumps, like beans or cabbages. But perhaps you are right. I just give that a low probability.
Re: This (Score:2)
Perchlorates are kinda unstable, and readily soluble in water.
Many spectroscopic readings from orbit, along with direct on the ground detections from rovers, indicate useful amounts of water ice.
Prepping martian regolith essentially requires wasing it in a wash-plant, with a settling tank. The perchlorate bearing water can be reprocessed through low pressure evaporation, then compressor based distillation. The dry perchlorate has potential as an inorganic chemical oxidizer, and as a source of oxygen gas, vi
Survive != Grow (Score:5, Informative)
Nowhere do they say it can actually grow on Mars though. They say they could send it to Mars, leave it exposed for a week, and when they bring it back it will regrow.
Re: Survive != Grow (Score:2)
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On one hand, totally technically correct.
On the other, it could be a boon to future terraforming efforts, because it won't die during the times when the local weather remains Mars-normal.
It's bananas to think that we can terraform Mars any time soon, of course. But the sooner we get started, the sooner it could happen. (Not "will" happen, that type of belief is for the religious.)
And the sooner we do get started, the more likely we are to learn useful things, whether for that purpose, or which might help us
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Let's not be children.
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Your expectations might be a bit high there...
Re:china can't teather a rocket (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is what I learned:
Chinese = the most highly developed and intelligent race
None-Chinese Asians = depending on nationality could be almost as developed as Chinese, but not equal
Philippinos = monkeys ( yes, they considered philippinos to be their own race and not be a branch of asians, at least when they talked about it, I called them out on this and that got a big laugh from them and a 'good dog' statement from one of them (I don't speak chinese and he said it in chinese, but one of the grad students took me aside to tell me what he had said once. )
Caucasions, about the same level of intelligence as a smart dog. Genetically about one step above said dog, maybe two steps above monkeys, though my hairy chest meant I was only one step above a monkey, but with higher intelligence.
Black people = one step above monkeys. about equal intelligence to a monkey.
Yes, my sample size was small, but they were so confident in these assessments that they would speak openly about this stuff as if these were settled facts.
I shit you not.
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Yeah, not sure what it has to do with rockets, though.
You should hear some of the propaganda China pushes throughout Asia. They claim to have invented computers, phones, smartphones, electricity, superconductors, essentially everything since the Enlightenment. And they did it out of the kindness of their hearts, not benefitting from it at the time because they are such a kind and yeomanlike race.
And younger Asian people believe it all, completely, especially the poorer countries who had limited access to
Not "show that the desert moss could reproduce" (Score:3)
"nor do they show that the desert moss could reproduce and proliferate in the Martian context" -- it can survive but not grow. Unless it can do that then how could it terraform Mars ?
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Indeed. I noticed the same thing. This moss does NOT grow on Mars and hence any implication of the possibility of cultivating it there is simply bogus.
Re:Luckyo reading ability (Score:5, Informative)
Was reading the article really that long?
I'll repeat: it does NOT grow on Mars. It slowly dies on Mars. It just happens to die much slower than most things, to the point where you could set it on Mars for a while, take it back to Earth, and it would grow. And radiation damage - once it's been allowed to recover - encourages branch growth. The same as pretty much any damage to aboveground portions of plants (try pruning a tree in your backyard, and see how much new growth there is a couple months later. Damaging / removing growth removes auxin suppression of axillary bud growth - and also, a shortage of sugar to the roots triggers gibberelin production, which again triggers top growth. BTW, there's inverse mechanisms going on in the roots as well; plants have this neat symmetrical balance-maintaining hormone system between auxins ("Grow to give me more WATER, roots! Stop growing, other buds!"), gibberelins ("Grow to give me more SUGAR, leaves! Stop growing, other roots!"), cytokinins ("The world is GREAT - everyone GROW!!!"), and ABA ("THE END IS NIGH! Hunker down and prepare for DOOM!")
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There's lots of other hormones too, like ethyene ("I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds"), jasminoids ("Hey, I think something's eating us..."), brassinosteroids (various growth triggers), florigen / antiflorigen proteins (only discovered surprisingly recently), and so forth, and also the above four I mentioned are more complicated than just that (auxin affects phototropism, most have roles in promoting or suppressing germination in seeds, etc etc), but I quite like the symmetric balance that those four p
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These are the kind of posts that I miss from the old /.
*sigh*
Well why wouldn't Moss be able to live on mars? (Score:5, Funny)
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Atmosphere (Score:2)
Can it survive without air?
Anyway, it's a useful discovery. Also it's only found in two places, and one of them is in America LOL.
So it did not actually grow (Score:2)
At least that is what I get from the somewhat convoluted story: Put this moss on mars, it survives but does nothing. Put it under better conditions and it starts to grow again. That is a bit different from it actually being able to grow on Mars.
Extremophiles are interesting... (Score:2)
But nowhere do they mention the point behind this moss. Zero nutritional, atmospheric or agricultural worth.
It has some neat tricks but how, exactly, do they help in an environment as nightmarish as that on Mars?
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Presumably oxygen generation from CO2. Unfortunately Mars doesn't even offer much of that to work with.
A different question (Score:1)
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produce oxygen as a byproduct.
...and watch it being stripped away because Mars has neither the mass nor the magnetosphere to hold on to its atmosphere?
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produce oxygen as a byproduct.
...and watch it being stripped away because Mars has neither the mass nor the magnetosphere to hold on to its atmosphere?
Exactly this. One of the very first things we should do if intending to colonize Mars is put some ~ 1 Tesla magnets in a Lagrangian point. Surprisingly you don't need really big magnets.
Without a magnetosphere all the rest of the "Let's go to Mars Kids!" is nothing other than mental masturbation and escapist thinking. Of course the reality is that creation of a synthetic magnetosphere is only step one of a multi-thousand project. None of this silly million people on Mars by 2050 malarkey.
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And that doesn't even speak to the level of cosmic radiation at the surface!
All the tests worked flawlessly...on MY planet! (Score:2)
"Deployment" to Mars will be a whole other animal.
Great, problem solved! (Score:2)
People can now go to Mars. They can grow this stuff to make clothes, and oxygen, and food. What a life!