One day, future astronauts could eat salad produced in the land of asteroids. The researchers say chili, rose radish and romaine lettuce plants thrived in combinations of peat and artificial asteroid soil. In the past, researchers have tried to grow plants using lunar soil. In the current work, published in the Planetary Science Journal, the researchers focused on “carbon-containing chondrite meteorites known to be rich in volatile compounds, particularly water.”
Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are three essential elements for plant growth that can be found in abundance in these meteorites and the asteroids from which they originated.
The scientists used a material that mimics the composition of space rocks and gave it to their graduate student Steven Russell and asked him to grow plants. The choice was simple: he chose types of plants that are already known to have grown aboard the International Space Station. The researchers compared how the plants grew in fake asteroid soil alone, peat moss alone, and various mixtures of the two.
The result?
The plants proliferated in all the mixtures with peat. Mind you, they didn’t make it on fake asteroid soil alone. No plants thrived in this condition.
Pulverizing asteroids of this kind could potentially provide a ready supply of agricultural material for use in space, and this could be done as part of efforts to mine space , according to the authors.
Referencia: S. Russell et al. CI asteroid regolith as an in situ plant growth medium for space crop production. Planetary Science Journal. Vol. 3, July 2022, p. 155. doi: 10.3847/PSJ/ac74c9.
