tinsnip asked:
nerdfishgirl answered:
The synthetic moon dirt is basically a close approximation of what moon dirt would be like structurally, but it’s sourced from here on earth (almost as good, and a whole lot cheaper!).
I didn’t really grow the carrot in the synthetic moon dirt, nor did anyone else, really. Some of my lab mates threw some microgreen seeds in the moon dirt awhile before I started my internship, and when I was harvesting the larger plants I found the carrots.
And honestly, they’re the most pitiful carrots I’ve ever seen.
Most of that growth didn’t happen in the synthetic moon dirt, to be honest, it happened in the arcilite that my labmate had put on top of the synthetic moon dirt, in order to convince this stuff to germinate.
Synthetic moon dirt is pretty much like wet quickcrete - plants hate the stuff a lot. One of my current side projects is actually on figuring out potential ways to amend the synthetic moon dirt so that plants will actually grow in it. I’m going to be testing cabbage, and perhaps a few carrots in it starting this upcoming week!
And the largest carrot was the one that another of my colleagues gave to Buzz Aldrin - I was not there, sadly :(
Also, this paper summarizes the results that a team in the Netherlands got when they attempted to grow plants in martian and lunar regolith simulants (and its not behind a paywall!).
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103138
deepintheshadyglen