Spanish scientists compared rocks collected on the Moon with those from a region on the island of Lanzarote and concluded that they are analogous, opening the door to research on the production and construction of food on Earth’s natural satellite.
In the investigation, the conclusions of which were published on the “Scientific Reports” website of the scientific journal Nature, three areas of Lanzarote, in the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands, were selected “with the aim of verifying which of them had the greatest series of features in common with the lunar surface” and Peñas de Tao was considered potentially analogous to the place where the Apollo 14 spacecraft, of the US space agency (NASA), landed on the Moon in 1971, explained researcher Fernando Alberquilla Martínez to the Lusa agency.
The analogy between the rocks of Lanzarote and the samples collected by NASA astronauts on the Moon was established with “petrophysical characterization” techniques – tests of hardness, roughness, color, porosity, saturation, etc. – and “geochemical and mineralogical characterization”, to evaluate in detail the composition of the rocks, according to Fernando Alberquilla Martínez, one of the four authors of the article published on this research, a project that is part of a collaboration between the Complutense University of Madrid and the Institute of Geosciences of Spain (CSIC-UCM).
Once the analogy between lunar and Lanzarote rocks was defined, “it was decided to develop the first Spanish lunar regolith simulator”, that is, a simulator of sand or decomposed rocks of the Moon, to now proceed with the “planetary geology” studies . (study of objects with solid surfaces in the universe) and “astrobiology” (related to the study of life in the universe).
The Spanish regolith simulator (designation of moon rock), called “LZS-1”, is not the first, since others have already been made in China and by NASA, but it is “the first time that a simulator has been developed in the that are carried out, we carry out petrophysical characterization tests looking at the Lanzarote basalt from the point of view of a resource for the habitability of the lunar surface”, explains Fernando Alberquilla Martínez, who answers Lusa’s questions in writing.
Thus, this team is now collaborating with the Green Moon Project, “a team of experts that wants to carry out cultivation experiments on the lunar surface and that is already carrying out germination and growth experiments on LZS-1.”
The researcher highlighted the “importance of using resources ‘in situ’ [no local] by astronauts on future missions” to the Moon or Mars.
“Planet Earth is our first base of operations where we have to train to achieve new goals. Taking a kilogram of material into space is tremendously expensive, approximately one million dollars. Therefore, it is unthinkable to continuously supply resources to astronauts who are on lunar bases, for example. In this way, the only way to survive, as our ancestors did, is by using the resources that are within their reach,” he said.
In this sense, he added, “the development of a lunar soil simulator is an excellent starting point for, with our feet on Earth” to develop “the necessary technology to obtain resources (food or crops) or use the regolith itself as a resource (construction of habitability modules, anti-radiation panels, roads, landing strips, etc…)”.
Fernando Alberquilla Martínez signs the article published earlier this month in “Scientific Reports”, with the original title “LZS-1, Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain) lunar (Apollo 14) basaltic soil simulator”, with researchers from the CSIC-UCM group Jesús Martínez-Frías, Valentín García-Baonza and Rosario Lunar.
Source: TSF
