Scientists have managed to grow plants in soil obtained from Moon by NASA’s Apollo astronauts. This has happened for the first time. Come to think of it, the Hollywood movie The Martian also had a similar concept where Mark Watney (Matt Damon) survived on Mars by learning to grow potatoes on the red planet's soil.
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Scientists were stunned when the unexpected happened recently. The team experimenting had no idea if anything would sprout in the harsh moon dirt and wanted to see if it could be used to grow food. Luckily, the results were positive and have encouraged more such experiments on the soil obtained from the moon.
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Robert Ferl of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences expressed disbelief when the experiment of growing plants on moon's soil showed positive results. Ferl and his colleagues planted thale cress in moon soil returned by Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and other moonwalkers and all of the seeds sprouted.
The downside was that after the first week, the coarseness and other properties of the lunar soil stressed the small, flowering weeds so much that they grew more slowly than seedlings planted in fake moon dirt from Earth. Most of the moon plants ended up stunted. The Apollo 11 samples — exposed a couple billion years longer to the elements because of the Sea of Tranquility’s older surface — were the least conducive for growth, according to scientists.
(With AP News inputs)
