By Drew Mortier
The University of Florida has officially donned its moon boots. The latest research from UF’s Space Plants Lab reveals that terrestrial plants can actually grow on the moon. The prospect of terraforming has launched out of the sci-fi realm and into that of pure science, and Gainesville can thank its own team of astute scientists, Anna-Lisa Paul, Robert Ferl and Stephen Elardo. These findings represent a pretty major contribution to what’s known as The Artemis Project, NASA’s foremost effort to create a sustainable presence on the moon, which later will serve as Earth’s forward base for future missions to Mars.
UF Space Plants Lab
In a nutshell, UF’s Space Plants Lab specializes in research on plant genetics and floral sustainability under extraterrestrial conditions. Their work has specifically targeted Arabidopsis Thaliana, a small flowering plant the team has engineered to display certain kinds of responses under the sway of microgravity. A second team, consisting of astronauts aboard a space station, records data on the plants and transmits it for the Earth team to monitor.
The discovery
Paul et al. have successfully demonstrated that terrestrial plants can grow in lunar soil, which is radically different from their earthly counterpart. No one is particularly interested (probably) in eating Arabidopsis Thaliana, but the discovery is an early move in the direction of growing more familiar crops on the moon—tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, etc. According to Ferl, once the moon is established as a base of operations, “It makes sense that we would want to use the soil that’s already there to grow plants.” When the team managed to sprout Arabidopsis in lunar soil, Paul recounted, “We were amazed. We did not predict that. That told us that the lunar soils didn’t interrupt the hormones and signals involved in plant germination.”