A group of researchers from Texas A&M University has made a significant step in the development of extraterrestrial agriculture, managing to grow a crop of chickpeas in a substrate based on lunar soil. This is reported by Reuters, writes UNN.
Details
The experiment, conducted in special climate chambers, aimed to test the possibility of providing astronauts with their own food during long missions to the Moon. The use of simulated lunar soil, created from samples of the "Apollo" program, confirmed that with the addition of organic components and beneficial fungi, growing legumes outside of Earth is quite real.
Technology for preparing lunar substrate
To grow chickpeas of the "Miles" variety, scientists used a mixture of regolith simulant from Space Resource Technologies and vermicompost - a product of earthworm activity.
The best results were shown by samples where the lunar dust content reached 75%, while the size of the beans remained stable regardless of the concentration of cosmic soil. However, the experiment also revealed the limit of plant endurance: seeds planted in 100% lunar simulant without nutrient additives died before flowering began.
Prospects for autonomous nutrition at lunar bases
The success with growing chickpeas opens the way to creating closed ecosystems at future lunar stations, where every gram of cargo from Earth is critically expensive.
Researchers plan to continue working on optimizing the composition of soil mixtures to minimize the proportion of terrestrial components. The introduction of such agricultural technologies will not only enrich the diet of colonists with fresh protein but also provide psychological comfort due to the presence of living greenery in isolated modules.