Astronauts will take plants to the Moon on the Artemis 3 mission – 03/31/2024 – Messenger Sideral

NASA announced the selection of three experiments to be sent to the Moon in its first manned mission to the surface in the 21st century, Artemis 3, scheduled (at the moment) for the end of 2026. One of them will carry out the first study of the ability of plants to survive and grow in the lunar environment.

Leaf (an acronym in English for “lunar effects on agricultural flora”) is led by Christine Escobar, from the company Space Lab Technologies, in Boulder, Colorado. He is expected to be the first to observe the performance of photosynthesis and plant growth under the solar illumination of the lunar south pole. The idea is to measure the impact of stress on plants due to space radiation and weaker gravity (on the Moon it has one sixth of the intensity measured on the Earth’s surface).

The experiment is a first step towards evaluating the viability of crops in lunar greenhouses, which could prove to be essential not only for feeding crews stationed on the natural satellite, but also for maintaining breathable air (via photosynthetic conversion of carbon dioxide). carbon into oxygen).

In addition to this, the other two experiments selected by NASA are Lems (acronym for “lunar environment monitoring station”) and LDA (“lunar dielectric analyzer”).

The first, led by Mehdi Benna of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, will measure “selenomotos” (lunar equivalents of earthquakes) and help investigate the Moon’s internal structure.

The second is the result of collaboration with Jaxa (Japanese space agency) and is led by Hideaki Miyamoto, from the University of Tokyo. Its objective is to measure the ability of regolith (dust that covers the lunar surface) to propagate an electric field, a fundamental parameter in the search for volatile substances present there, mainly water ice.

The trio was chosen due to the requirement for human manipulation in their installation on the Moon. But it is certain that other experiments will also be added to this first mission, which has the ambition of carrying out the longest stay on lunar soil ever carried out by astronauts, something like one week. The current record, set by Apollo 17 in 1972, is three days.

NASA remains firm with its plans to return to the Moon with a crew before the end of the decade, but the choice is creating problems for the agency’s other initiatives, with a declining annual budget and the high costs of the Artemis program and the automated return mission. of samples from Mars.

For 2025, the administration cut funds allocated to the operation of the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes, generating protests among astronomers. The cut on Hubble was smaller (10%), but Chandra lost 40% of its budget, which is expected to continue shrinking until it reaches around 10% of the current value, in 2029. In addition, JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA) promoted an 8% cut in its workforce in order to contain expenses. Taking astronauts to the Moon and bringing rocks from Mars is neither easy nor cheap.

This column is published on Mondays in print, in Folha Corrida.

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