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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the seeds-of-chang'e dept.

China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

Seeds taken up to the Moon by China's Chang'e-4 mission have sprouted, says China National Space Administration. It marks the first time any biological matter has grown on the Moon, and is being seen as a significant step towards long-term space exploration. [...] Plants have been grown on the International Space Station before but never on the Moon.

[...] The Chinese Moon lander was carrying among its cargo soil containing cotton and potato seeds, yeast and fruit fly eggs. The plants are in a sealed container on board the lander. The crops will try to form a mini biosphere - an artificial, self-sustaining environment.

[...] On Tuesday, Chinese state media said the cotton seeds had now grown buds. The ruling Communist Party's official mouthpiece the People's Daily tweeted an image of the sprouted seed, saying it marked "the completion of humankind's first biological experiment on the Moon".

Fred Watson, Australian Astronomical Observatory's astronomer-at-large, told the BBC the development was "good news". "It suggests that there might not be insurmountable problems for astronauts in future trying to grow their own crops on the moon in a controlled environment."

According to SCMP, a similar biosphere experiment will be conducted on Earth for comparison.

A Chang'e-5 lunar exploration vehicle could be launched by the end of 2019, and would include a 2 kg sample return. At least 3 more Chang'e missions are planned.

Previously: China's Chang'e 4 Spacecraft Lands on the Far Side of the Moon
Chang'e Lander Sends Back Far Side Panorama


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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:19PM (3 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:19PM (#786918) Homepage

    But... if it's sealed and self-contained... what exactly does that prove?

    That things trapped in an Earth-like environment grow like in an Earth-like environment?

    I mean, it's something that has to be done at some point, but is it really that big a deal if we've already done it aboard ISS?

    Now, if they got something to grow out in the open on the Moon, now that's news (and probably not possibly). Or if they'd started laying down the equipment to keep that sealed container on the Moon indefinitely with the necessary power, lighting, etc. to keep it growing.

    I think you're gonna need a MUCH larger bottle to contain anything approaching a self-sustaining plant crop on the Moon, though. I read that you need 10 full-grown trees just to make the O2 of one human - to sustain a crop of plants if going to take a minimum of a field-size up, and then more for the sustaining equipment. And that's assuming nobody's pinching nutrients from the cycle - like, say, a human actually eating something, or a fly pest getting out of control.

    Hell, we could have just taken up one of those sealed orbs with the sea-monkeys and plants that together live about a year, that you can buy for a pittance. Encase it in something more substantial and with a bunch of sensors and you'd have got more science out of it.

    If the opposite result would be more surprising, it's not news. "China's experiment to grow cotton seeds on the Moon fails inexplicably - sealed environment sensors cannot detect why".

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  • (Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:36PM (1 child)

    by pkrasimirov (3358) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:36PM (#786927)

    > I read that you need 10 full-grown trees just to make the O2 of one human
    Agreed. Might be true for Earth and it's moon but not the same on Mars. So yeah, not a lettuce proof for the red planet. Probably some deep-sea algae, dunno.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Wednesday January 16 2019, @05:18PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Wednesday January 16 2019, @05:18PM (#787454) Journal

      Maybe Chlorella [wikipedia.org] algae instead of Apple Trees of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the beginning:

      Chlorella vulgaris culture as a regulator of CO2 in a bioregenerative life support system [harvard.edu]

      (note that the authors of this 2013 article are from the "Laboratory of Environmental Biology and Life Support Technology" in China)

      What was it again that Tank said to Neo? "it contains everything you need"?

      I wonder what kind of trees would be the first that Moon colonists clamour for. Bananas? Cocoa? Caoutchouc for space-suit repair?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:07PM (#786965)

    I read that you need 10 full-grown trees just to make the O2 of one human

    An adult human consumes about 1kg of oxygen per day, producing about 1.4kg of carbon dioxide per day. Obviously this amount depends on various factors; these were the figures used when designing the Apollo missions to calculate how much oxygen and lithium hydroxide were required for the mission.

    A quick web search gives an estimate that an "average" adult tree will photosynthesize about 22kg of CO₂ per year. Since photosynthesis of 6 CO₂ molecules (plus other stuff) results in 6 O₂ molecules (plus other stuff), and O₂ has about ~75% the mass as CO₂, this "average" tree will produce about 16kg of O₂ per year from photosynthesis, enough for our adult human to survive for a fortnight. So we'd need more like 25 trees per human.

    In reality you probably wouldn't use trees for this. I'd expect algae do more photosynthesis per tonne of algae than trees do per tonne of tree.