Dawes Middle School students help plant the seeds for agriculture on the moon
LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – Students at Dawes Middle School were at UNL’s greenhouse on the Innovation Campus on Friday afternoon.
They were there to start growing the plants in the Plant the Moon challenge.
The challenge was created by NASA, and the task is to try to grow plants, specifically crops, in lunar soil.
It’s tied into the Artemis missions, which will send astronauts back to the moon.
The challenge is helping NASA figure out now, before the astronauts are up there, what will grow best and how it will grow best.
The students chose to attempt to grow pea shoots.
They are using just potting soil as a control and then different mixes of lunar soil and potting soil to see which mix works the best.
“We have two different mixes. There is a 1-to-1 lunar soil to normal soil mix and then a 3-to-1 lunar soil to normal soil mix,” said Cassie Palmer, a Ph.D. student of complex biosystems at UNL.
She gave her hypothesis as to what is going to yield the best results.
“I think that the 1-to-1 mix is just going to perform better,” Palmer said. “The pea shoots, the roots are going to grow better, they’re going to be able to take up more nutrients, and they probably won’t get quite as stressed due to the chemical nature of the lunar simulant.”
The middle school students will get to see how the plants are growing with the state-of-the-art LemnaTec Scanalyzer.
UNL is one of the few places that has this automated equipment.
The Scanalyzer takes pictures of the plants in different lights and positions. It then analyzes those pictures and provides data about the plant’s growth and other important factors.
