Science
Farming on Mars will be a lot harder than ‘The Martian’ made it seem – The Washington Post
Growing plants in Red Planet soil will require adding nutrients and removing toxic chemicals.
Researchers planted lettuce and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana in three kinds of fake Mars dirt. Two were made from materials mined in Hawaii or the Mojave Desert that look like dirt on Mars. To mimic the makeup of the Martian surface even more closely, the third was made from scratch using volcanic rock, clays, salts and other chemical ingredients that NASAs Curiosity rover has seen on the planet. While both lettuce and A. thaliana survived in the Marslike natural soils, neither could grow in the…
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