For the first time, scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon collected by NASA's Apollo astronauts.
Researchers had no idea if anything would sprout in the harsh moon dirt and wanted to see if it could be used to grow food by the next generation of lunar explorers. The results stunned them.
The downside was that after the first week, the coarseness and other properties of the lunar soil stressed the small, flowering weeds so much that they grew more slowly than seedlings planted in fake moon dirt from Earth. Most of the moon plants ended up stunted.People are also reading… The longer the soil was exposed to punishing cosmic radiation and solar wind on the moon, the worse the plants seemed to do.
One solution might be to use younger geologic spots on the moon, like lava flows, for digging up planting soil. The environment also could be tweaked, altering the nutrient mixture or adjusting the artificial lighting, NASA said the timing for such an experiment was finally right, with the space agency looking to put astronauts back on the moon in a few years.
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