As the man's desire increases, technology is born! Well, we haven't been able to create a habitable environment for humans on Moon but we have started testing the conditions on Moon for habitable conditions by growing plants there. Growing plants is a vital step toward sustainability in a new environment. Aside from the obvious life support that vegetation would provide — air, food, and water — it would also provide another integral aspect to a habitable lunar environment.
A statement from the office of the chief technologist at NASA Ames Research Centre said, "Plants react to aspects of a harsh environment similarly to humans, as their genetic material can be damaged by radiation. A relatively safe way to test long-term lunar exposure is to send some plants up there and monitor their health. NASA likens this to being like sending a canary into a coal mine."
Rather than making the trip and dropping the plants off itself, NASA plans to use commercial spaceflight as the vehicle by which the plants will be sent up to the moon. NASA is constructing a small, lightweight (a little over two pounds), self-sustaining habitat for the vegetation which will be delivered to the moon via the Moon Express, a lunar lander that’s part of the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition to create a robotic spacecraft that can fly to and land on the moon.
This type of collaboration between NASA and Google for sending the habitat on Moon has shown a new way of conducting projects by minimizing costs. If it wasn't for the Google's competition, NASA would have to spend a large amount of money on sending a mission specifically for the purpose of delivering the habitat.
Once the lander arrives on the moon, water will be added to basil, turnip, and Arabidopsis (a small flowering plant) seeds kept in the habitat, then monitored for five to 10 days and compared to controls back on Earth. NASA will also monitor the actual habitat itself, looking toward its scalability since a two-pound habitat won’t support human life. Currently, the chamber can support 10 basil seeds, 10 turnip seeds, and around 100 Arabidopsis seeds. It also holds the bit of water that initiates the germination process, and uses the natural sunlight that reaches the moon to support the plant life.
In order to study the quality of the plant growth and movement, the habitat will take images and beam them back home which will be compared with the controls at the Earth. NASA has taken an initiative to curb costs in this as well - samples of control will be distributed in schools where students will monitor the growth of the samples - thus, collecting data on a large number of control without running them themselves and also letting youth to be a part of such an innovation.
Following the Lunar Growth experiment NASA said it would send further experiments to see how plants survive through the lunar night and even would breed plants on the Moon. It said: “Survival to 14 days demonstrates plants can sprout in the Moon’s radiation environment at 1/6 g. Survival to 60 days demonstrates that sexual reproduction can occur in a lunar environment. Survival to 180 days shows effects of radiation on dominant and recessive genetic traits. Afterwards, the experiment may run for months through multiple generations, increasing science return.”
With NASA growing Lunar Salad and Mars One sending people on Mars, our kids will be visiting relatives on another planet for vacations! ;)
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