[SpaceProgram] Introduction & Leightweight probes

[Luke Weston]

> What would be interesting: Grow bacteria on nothing but moon soil. Taake
> some soil, add water, atmosphere and bacteria. Will they thrive? -> If so,
> phosphorus etc. is in the moon soil.
>

We already know a great deal about the geology and mineralogy of the
moon, and the chemical composition of the lunar regolith.

There's no wheel there that needs to be reinvented, and no fundamental
new discovery that needs to be made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil

You can also commercially buy standard JSC-1A lunar regolith simulant
from Orbitec, which is interesting:

http://www.orbitec.com/store/simulant.html

They even have Mars regolith simulant too :)

There is some existing research and literature in this area,
indicating that certain types of life, such as cyanobacteria, will
grow on lunar regolith (or simulant) when water (and other factors
such as light, if appropriate) is added along with an appropriate
artificial atmosphere.

For example:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1673.pdf

If you got some regolith simulant, autoclaved it or something to make
sure it's sterile (along with all your other equipment and vessel, got
some sort of benign sample of appropriate bacteria or cyanobacteria
from an appropriate biology supplier (ATCC or whatever the go-to
people are for that sort of thing these days) and supplied an
appropriate gaseous atmosphere from a gas cylinder, and added some
distilled water, and supplied some light on the vessel, I suppose it
wouldn't be too difficult to reproduce such an experiment.
Interesting.