First flight of Lunar plant growth experiment | Hacker News Reader

First flight of Lunar plant growth experiment

nasa.gov

31 pointsmurtza8 comments

The lead contact point for this proposal, Chris McKay of NASA Ames, had a similar proposal around 14 years ago for growing a rose plant on a Mars lander. It'll be fun to see this idea finally (hopefully) take root.

Next: plants vs zombies in space. Seriously, this is super cool. This study has further implications of letting us know how plant life grows in different gravitational environment, which would give us interesting insight about life on other planets and how* Earth's gravity affected ecosystem and/or evolution on our own planet.

* Further studies will be needed before we can make any inferences on that front, but this is a good start.

NASA waiting on Google for a ride up to the moon...C'MON MAN

To be fair, they did get there first.

I am surprised that such an experiment hasn't been conducted before! Was it just caution that held them back or something else? Since the moon lacks an atmosphere, there is zero chance of contamination of the moon with plants.

Wouldn't sending out any lifeforms from Earth to other planets contaminate, for lack of a better word, the environment there? There could be a lot about these places that we don't know yet.

Were the moon teeming with life, that might be a concern, but we know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the moon is without life. It's unlikely that any life well-adapted to earth's environment will flourish on the moon without a support system, so there is little risk of harm to the moon's environment (or lack thereof).

Not in these cases. The plants are going to be sent in sealed containers which themselves will be free of external contamination. Barring physical damage like a meteor impact or a crashed lander, the chance of "contaminating" the moon is slim to none.

Even then, the conditions on the moon are such that organisms will either die or go completely dormant in the low-temperature, oxygen-free environment.

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