Researchers have taken a tiny piece of soil from the city of Prosser, in Washington state to dispatch it with some of its “inhabitants” to space, which actually happened last week.
The soil and its inhabitants of bacteria blasted off into space from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday.
Scientists will study what the bacteria do in a microgravity environment to learn more about how soil microbial communities function in space. That’s information scientists need to grow food either in space or on another celestial body.
The experiment, funded by NASA, is called DynaMoS, or Dynamics of Microbiomes in Space. The study is being conducted by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
The soil microbial community headed for the International Space Station is composed of eight species of bacteria that PNNL scientists isolated from a scientific field site in Prosser that is run by Washington State University. The microbes will be among the payload of NASA’s resupply mission.
PNNL scientists will study how the microbes behave in space compared to how they behave on Earth. Why do some species flourish under certain conditions and struggle under others? Who needs which partners to thrive, and who might be expendable? Will microbes work in space like they do on Earth? Answers to those questions could help plant food in space.
“We still have a lot to learn about how microorganisms behave on Earth. There are even more questions to address if we are to grow food in space, for instance on the lunar surface or for a long-lasting mission to Mars. How do microbes behave in microgravity, for instance?” Janet Jansson, a chief scientist in the experiment, said in a report published by the PNNL laboratory.
“Plants need beneficial soil microbes to help them grow. Microbes can provide nutrients and protect plants from drought, from pathogens, and from other kinds of stress. Understanding how microbes interact as they do this is the first step for building communities of microbes that can support plant growth in places like the moon, Mars, or the space station,” said Jansson.
