The ANU is extending a leaf to help a start-up grow plants on the moon by 2025, in a study that also aims to unlock new methods to boost sustainable food production closer to home.
Australian space start-up Lunaria One was began with the sole purpose of finding if plants can grow on the moon and now its Australian Lunar Experiment Promoting Horticulture will put this question to the test.
The research is one of the integral questions to answer before humans can begin to live in space.
The mission is an international collaboration between a number of institutions, including Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, ANU and Ben Gurion University in Israel, as well as industry bodies.
Humans have taken plants to space before, and successfully grown plants in space, but they have never spread their roots to the moon.
ANU Associate Professor Caitlin Byrt is a science adviser for Lunaria One and joined the project when she was cold-called by another researcher at the start-up.
She said plants are "the best organism to go pioneering in space with" because "plants don't mind the absence of gravity".
Associate Professor Byrt, who works for the ANU Research School of Biology and the ANU Institute for Space, said the project will also help researchers understand how plants, and food, can grow in harsh environments on Earth.
"Most of the work that our team do is for engineering crops for future food security on Earth. So we're obviously moving into this transition of extreme weather events, and how on Earth are we going to protect agriculture? So that's our main focus," she said.
"This is almost like a playground for the ultimate extreme. If you can get something to survive up there, then you can get things to survive down here."
Deciding which plants will go to the moon requires some weeding out, and only the most compatible species will be taken to space.
The types of plants sent to the moon will be carefully selected based on how quickly they germinate and their tolerance to extreme temperature swings experienced in space.
One of the plants to be considered for the mission is an Australian native resurrection grass known as Tripogon loliiformis that can endure harsh conditions and survive in a dormant state for months without any water.
Lunaria One have a ticket on a flight to the moon in 2025 for a tiny payload aboard SpaceIL's Beresheet 2 spacecraft.
They hope to send a specially designed chamber, which has a "terrarium-like structure, only about the size of a shoebox" filled with their carefully selected plants and seeds and equipped with sensors, a camera and water.
After landing on the lunar surface the plants' growth and general health will be monitored for 72 hours and data and images will be beamed back to Earth.
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