Mosses are one of Earth’s great terraformers, transforming barren rock into fertile soil, and now a team of scientists proposes that these non-vascular plants might be able to do the same on Earth. Mars.
we should Whether or not we can bring life from Earth to our red neighbor is another matter. wonderful Achievements and This is our planet.
but if We decided it was worth tinkering with. Martian soil To create a second home for us Earthlings, ecologist Xiaoshuang Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues have a candidate material that they think could do just that.
The Earth’s surface was once extremely inhospitable to life, but that hasn’t stopped Group of organisms It is called Moss It prevents marine life (which today includes mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) from leaving the bountiful safety of the ocean in search of new horizons.
The success of these land pioneers depended on their ability to absorb and digest nutrients that seeped from or ran over the rocks, and to survive extremely harsh environments that would have reduced other organisms to dust. But as they spread across the Earth’s rocky fringes, they created soils that gradually paved the way for other, less hardy life forms to gain foothold on land.
This genetic talent continues to serve mosses around the world, and researchers believe they can harness the natural talents of mosses. Build a colony on Mars,other Low durability lifeformslike crops.
Unlike the lush forest moss you might imagine, they live a much easier life than their ancestors, Syntrichia caninervis They are committed to maintaining an extremely simple lifestyle and thrive in the deserts of China and the United States, the Pamir Mountains, Tibet, the Middle East, Antarctica and the icebergs of the Arctic.
of Gurbantungut Desert Northwest China S. CaninervisThey grow more densely here than anywhere else in the world, despite temperatures ranging from -40 °C to 65 °C (-40 °F to 149 °F) and relative humidity dropping to as low as 1.4%.
Li and his colleagues tested the moss, S. Caninervis It’s not easy to step out of your very large comfort zone.
In the lab, they tested the plants’ response and recovery to extreme dehydration, prolonged freezing (-80°C for 3-5 years, -196°C for 15-30 days), and radiation (doses of 5-16 million). GThe Planetary Atmosphere Simulation Facility (PASF) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducts simulations that recreate environments similar to those of the atmosphere (Earth) and Mars.
In the Mars simulation, the plants were exposed to a pressure of about 650 Pascals (Pa), close to the 680-790 Pa found on Mars. Nighttime temperatures were -60 °C and daytime temperatures were 20 °C, similar to the temperatures found in the equatorial and mid-latitude regions of Mars. The atmospheric gas composition and ultraviolet radiation levels were also simulated to be closer to those on Mars.
Dehydration is S. CaninervisA walk in the park. And in the extreme cold, it shrugged. All of the frozen plants regrow after thawing, and plants that were dehydrated before the freeze recover much more quickly than those that were waterlogged.
Faced with a radiation level of 50 Gy, which would kill a human being, S. Caninervis He didn’t even blink. At 500 Grey, the growth seemed to accelerate even more.
The moss that was exposed to the Mars-like conditions after being dehydrated only took 30 days to recover and behave as if nothing had happened. The moss that was rehydrated took a little longer to recover but still survived and emerged.
“We still have a long way to go to create self-sufficient habitats on other planets, but we S. Caninervis “As a pioneering plant to grow on Mars,” the researchers said. write.
“In the future, we hope to deploy this promising moss on Mars and other planets. Moon To further test the feasibility of plant establishment and growth in space.”
Even if growing moss on Mars is a terrible idea, S. Caninervis The fact that bone dry land can be transformed into a “living skin” even after surviving extreme conditions gives us some hope for life on our planet, which appears to be much more resilient than we sometimes think.
This study Innovation.
