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A huge step has just been made in the race to achieve a permanent lunar colony. Scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, have managed to set up a successful bacterial culture on a substrate made with lunar soil, plus the supplementation of air, water and light. They used a kind of bacteria that is very robust and capable of growing in highly inhospitable environments and were among the first organisms to have populated the Earth more than a billion years ago.

They thing future colonists on the Moon will be able to use the cyanobacteria to extract resources such as minerals and other substances from the soil that could be used for other applications like making fuel and fertiliser for crops.

One of the biggest challenges to the plans for lunar colonisation is that Lunar soil is inhospitable to plants because many of the nutrients it contains are in the form of tough minerals that the plants cannot assimilate. The investigators took samples of cyanobacteria from hot springs at the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and put them in containers with a soil designed to simulate the composition of the lunar sands. Amazingly, the bacteria were able to turn the otherwise unassimilable minerals from the soil and turn them into usable nutrients and grow.

The same nutrients could be extracted artificially, nut it requires large amount of energy and complicated processing. But nature does it better. Using only sunlight as the energy source, the Cyanobacteria do their extraction work mor efficiently (although more slowly) than heating the soil artificially.

This project is part of an ambitious plan to build permanent stations in the Moon with the capacity of supporting human settlements. Once the colony is supplied with cyanobacteria-growing chambers fed with water, light and lunar soil they will be able to use the bacterial biomass to make rich fertilizers to grow food plants in hydroponic greenhouses. They could even be used to make methane to be used as rocket fuel.

The applications could be endless, and the first move has already been done.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com