Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars?

Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars? That was the question that started Dr Wieger Wamelink, ecologist and exobiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, on a research quest in 2013.

The dirt on growing plants off-world

The first step on the journey was an experiment to determine whether plants could grow in Moon or Mars soil. But there’s a fairly fundamental issue at the heart of that question: we don’t have any. NASA has some samples of Moon soil (regolith, strictly speaking) that the Apollo moonwalkers brought back to Earth. Obviously, they don’t have enough to go around planting gardens in it. And we haven’t even tried to bring samples back from Mars yet, although a sample return mission is on the cards.

So scientists who would like to carry out experiments on extraterrestrial soil have to use simulants. Our off-world explorations have told us a fair amount about the mineral composition of the Moon and the Mars (at least in the places we’ve investigated), and researchers have found that there are soils on Earth that can stand in for them. Martian soil simulants tend to be made from volcanic areas on Earth (such as Hawaii); apparently, the Moon is more like Arizona. For these experiments, Wamelink got his hands on some JSC-1a (Mars-like simulant) and JSC1-1a (Moondust simulant) and used some reasonably nasty soil from beneath the Rhine river as a nutrient-poor Earth-based control soil.

“To work in this soil was very special. Nobody, not even NASA, could tell us what would happen, even just by simply adding water.” 

(This wasn’t the first time plants were grown in lunar soil, and I blogged about the early experiments a while back.)

Analysis of Moon and Mars soils suggests that they have all of the