A recent preprint posted to bioRxiv investigates how chickpeas have been successfully grown in lunar regolith simulants (LRS), marking the first time such a guideline has been established not only for chickpeas, but also for growing food for long-term human space missions.
Makes sense that if you can plant plants in a plantable media, over time you may develop that media into something akin to soil, which means you have a more stable grounding for future generations of plants.
(I honestly tried for some alliteration or punnage, this was the best I could do, forgive me 😄).
Yes, I’d think that would be the goal. Long term habitation will need plants of many kinds. Just start listing all the ways people benefit from plants and you’ll see the list just goes on and on. At the huge price per kilogram of launched mass, making soil out of local materials and developing closed-loop systems just makes economic sense. Soil is a living thing after all, it doesn’t wear out or go away. (Older than dirt!) Learning how to make healthy functioning soil from native regolith is an important part of the whole in-situ resource utilization push from the major space agencies.
Exactly.
We already do a lot of research on earth to maintain and improve soils, such basic things as turning under a winter crop which is used as a fixative, making that soil healthier.
Seems like it could work with regolith (as in these tests) - turn each plant generation back into the regolith, composting it, eventually it becomes soil with everything being retained.
It’ll be really interesting to see the plant growth and soil improvements over the generations of composting (which I assume is part of this testing).
“Older than dirt” lol, yep!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
So I think Azolla (a floating fern that fixes nitrogen) is the way to go to jumpstart an extraterrestrial soil. It’s insanely productive and makes amazing compost. The wikipedia link is just a cool thing I like to share.