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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 ...
Researchers said on Thursday they have found a way to turn inhospitable lunar soil fertile by introducing bacteria that enhance the availability of phosphorus, an important plant nutrient.
Plants grown in moon dirt showed signs of stress, were smaller, and grew more slowly than their counterparts grown in soil from Earth. Researchers successfully grew plants in Apollo-era lunar soil.
Reactive nitrogen is a required constituent of soil used for plant growth, and it is possible that nitrogen fixing species, such as bacteria, could aide in supplying reactive nitrogen. However, a 2014 study suggested that plants were able to germinate and survive a period of 50 days on a Martian and lunar soil by using simulant soils.
In the particular case of the Moon, this is more often known as lunar gardening. Planetary bodies lacking an atmosphere will generally also lack any erosional processes, with the possible exception of volcanism , and as a result impact debris accumulates at the object's surface as a rough "soil," commonly referred to as regolith .
Lunar soil has also been proven [verification needed] to allow plants to grow on, tested in a laboratory at the University of Florida. [50] These experiments showed that while the plant Arabidopsis thaliana can germinate and grow in lunar soil, that there are challenges presented in the plants ability to thrive, as many were slow to develop ...
In a study published in the journal Nature on Thursday, researchers at the University of Florida were able to successfully grow plants in lunar soil sample Scientists Grew Plants in Lunar Soil for ...
The differences between Earth's soil and lunar soil mean that plants struggle to grow in it. [ 32 ] [ 33 ] As a result long-term space missions could require complicated and expensive efforts to provide food, such as importing Earth soil , chemically treating lunar regolith to remove heavy metals and oxidize iron atoms, and selectively breeding ...