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First green leaf on moon dies as temperatures plummet
The appearance of a single green leaf hinted at a future in which astronauts would grow their own food in space, potentially setting up residence at outposts on the moon or other planets. Now, barely after it had sprouted, the cotton plant onboard China’s lunar rover has died.
The plant relied on sunlight at the moon’s surface, but as night arrived at the lunar far side and temperatures plunged as low as -170C, its short life came to an end.
Prof Xie Gengxin of Chongqing University, who led the design of the experiment, said its short lifespan had been anticipated. “Life in the canister would not survive the lunar night,” Xie said.
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First Green Leaf on Moon Dies as Temperatures Plummet
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QOTD:
"My life is a soap opera, but who gets the movie rights?"
(Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Saturday January 19 2019, @03:59PM (2 children)
Except that cost isn't lost. Try to keep up - if we want to go to space in a serious way, we want a moonbase. So, we try it, it fails, everyone goes home. Moonbase is still there. We go back, build whatever else it needed, and try again. If it takes a dozen attempts before we make something sustainable, so what? Each time we still have everything we built before, little is lost but the cost of transporting the crew and any lost supplies.
Plus, a catastrophic failure is relatively unlikely - we've got almost 20 years experience keeping people alive and reasonably healthy living in a tin can in orbit - we're just talking about putting another tin can on the moon, where the two biggest orbital problems problems of microgravity and radiation can be easily addressed. The ride home in case of trouble takes a bit longer, but otherwise there's few new problems other than dealing with the dust. And lots of work to do in learning how to build and expand the base effectively, while trying to become more self-sustaining.
(Score: -1, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 19 2019, @08:57PM (1 child)
try to keep up. that's funny. the failure of the moon base is the moon base built wrong, and not usable. not a failure of the AC system that gets replaced. it's impressive the level of stupidity one has to have, to think we should give a "first go" at building a complex structure on the freaking moon before trying it on earth first. to work out any unforeseen issues. I'd tell you to try to keep up, but I don't think you have the IQ to tie your shoe laces together, velcro boy.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday January 20 2019, @05:00AM
Right - because we can make pressure vessels that survive the rigors of orbit and the (fairly) deep sea, but making something that will survive sitting in a thermally stable, radiation-shielded vacuum tunnel under 1/6th gravity? That's way beyond anything we've ever attempted. The only big new challenges would be dealing with the dust, and far more frequent outside access than for the ISS. Those will potentially be doozies, but even if we deal with it completely wrong it's still just a matter of adding a new entry/exit module while abandoning/repurposing the old one - that and a thorough cleaning of the old base and you're back in action.
Note that I've said nothing about *building* anything on the moon? Almost every moon-base plan I've seen initially involves deploying, or at most assembling, an Earth-built outpost, something that mostly needs be scarcely more complex than a network of air-tight kevlar tents fastened to palettes to keep them off the ground. More involved early construction on the moon will almost certainly be for the purpose of learning how to build on the moon, with lunar materials, in the only place in the solar system you can actually do that. If you get an expanded habitat, nicer "garage", or whatever else out of it too, that's great, but that's a secondary objective, and if it fails then it serves the primary purpose: figuring out what does and doesn't work on the moon.
So the farm doesn't work out right? So what? You're not going to be trying to be self-sufficient out of the gate, except maybe as an experiment to see how well you can do. The beauty of the moon over anywhere else in the solar system is that you can, in an emergency (or when the timing is just right), order fresh equipment and supplies from Earth and receive them in a few days. We're talking a research base here, hoping to become at least a crude mining colony in the medium-term, not a mostly self sufficient colony like we'd need to jump straight to on Mars.