If we ever hope to send people to live on Mars for an extended period of time, we’ll need to keep them warm, safe, and well-fed. That last requirement poses a challenge on a mission that can carry only a limited amount of supplies.
Plants are hardy things, but they have some essential requirements. To grow well, they need warmth, reasonable atmospheric pressure, and protection from harmful radiation. Those things would be a challenge to provide on Mars, except for the fact that humans need all of them as well.
Wieger Wamelink, a plant breeder and ecologist at Wageningen University who is one of the leading researchers on agriculture on the moon and Mars, told Digital Trends that growing plants in space is actually very comparable to city agriculture, the movement to grow food efficiently in urban settings. Often, that’s accomplished by setting up sterile environments in indoor habitats with LED lights. In principle, he said, “that’s something you can do on Mars, or in the desert if you want to, or in a city.”
The biggest barrier to growing crops on Mars, though, is the lack of something seemingly simple: Good old-fashioned dirt. Soil on Earth is full of living organisms as well as certain minerals, like phosphorus and potassium, that plants use. Mars doesn’t have soil — instead, it has a dead, dusty material called regolith covering its surface.
That means you can experiment with Martian “soil” here on Earth. While the simulant isn’t cheap, it is available to purchase for research purposes. Around a decade ago, Wamelink wondered if the simulant could be used to grow crops and looked into the subject. “What I found out,” he said, “much to my surprise I must say, is no one ever tried that.”
So he started planting seeds in Mars, moon, and Earth soil to compare their growth. In his first experiments, Wamelink expected plants would struggle in the Mars simulant. “It’s a very nutrient-poor soil,” he explained. It has no organic matter in it, and it contains heavy metals that could prevent plants from germinating.
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