The Moon Society Forum

Lunax Generation 2.0 Purposes

David Dunop, Director of Project Development
Moon Society
January 15, 2009



Educational Purposes
The Lunar National Agricultural Experiment is intended to provide an opportunity for student research in areas that are important to the settlement of the Moon and that build skills and understanding of physics, chemistry, life sciences and engineering (STEM disciplines). It is therefore also an opportunity for instructors to challenge students with research problems that engage their interests and creativity and that address "authentic" scientific questions. It is also an important instructional goal to demonstrate to students the interdisciplinary nature of problems and their need to absorb information, techniques, and skills that draw on a variety of disciplines as they seek to address research challenges.

Affordable Technology
A significant focus as a practical matter, is the ability to provide affordable techniques for conducting experiments. The Lunax project started using 5 gallon plastic buckets outfitted with lights and timers for creating a compact plant growth enclosure. More recently, we have used an old refrigerator, again outfitted with lighting and timers to create a more advanced temperature controlled plant growth chamber. We are now looking to provide affordable LED lighting technologies to further refine the controlled lighting environment as well as to reduce energy consumption.

The Range of Lunax Experimental Topics/Challenges
An original focus of Lunax experiments is based on the fact there is lunar lighting cycle which has a two week day and a two week night. The solar flux of approximately 1360 watts per square meter ( in the vacuum of space above the Earth and at the lunar surface) is more intense than that experienced by plants on the Earth's surface. These differences in environment between the Earth and the Moon create engineering challenges for those who would wish to provide an agricultural facility on the Moon. We of course assume the creation of a pressured lunar habitation system sheltered from the radiation of cosmic rays, solar flares but "open" to solar lighting or at least utilizing solar lighting through indirect means such as fiber optics.

First is the problem of creating a power supply for lighting plants during the two week lunar night. Direct lighting during the lunar day is not hard to conceptualize. However, solar lighting systems are not available during the lunar night. There must be plant lighting during the lunar night from a lighting system of some sort. Power for a plant lighting system must come from some other potential sources than direct solar energy during the two week lunar night. These might include fuel cells, nuclear fission/fusion reactors, or systems which might store solar energy in thermal mass and extract's the heat energy via some system which could convert thermal energy to electricity (such as a steam generator).

Because of the expense of these power systems there may very well be power constraints on the plant lighting systems. With cheap solar energy in field agriculture on Earth, the constraints on the energy available to plants results from the variation from the 24 diurnal cycle, weather, and natural seasonal variation. Green house agriculture on Earth does rely on artificial lighting systems especially in northern climates. Energy costs therefore are a significant constraint on controlled agricultural environments on Earth. Large scale controlled environment production of food crops such as tomatoes for example are located in the American Southwest in Arizona due to the natural cheap solar energy advantage there.

On the Moon the need to create biological life support systems and food production systems will also face constraints based on power. The costs of creating a power supply adequate to the requirements of a complex controlled environmental system are a significant constraint on the implementation and utilization of biological systems in space. Yet, without such systems there cannot be any settlement of the Moon, Mars, or other off Earth environments.

Our engineering systems must evolve to permit the creation of environmental systems which permit not only astronauts to exist but a host of other biological organisms and systems. Humans are a small fraction of their environmental support system. A bio-regenerative life support system calls for not only food production but a system which mimics the Earth's capacities to recycle materials and efficiently use energy flows.
Therefore, the exploration of lunar lighting schedules on the growth of agricultural plants was a beginning concern for development of experiments and of investigating the adaptability of plants to the unique circumstances on the Moon.

Energy Efficiency of Lighting Systems
The energy efficiency of lighting systems is another area of interest. Early projections of the needs of a lunar settlement of 10,000 indicated that the power requirements of plant lighting would dominate all others. This was based on the technology of plant lighting at the time (the 1970's). Research facilities used florescent lights (which lose efficiency over time,) or high pressure sodium lamps.

Lunax experiments originally outfitted buckets with circular florescent lights and more recently with improved helical florescent bulbs. These were used primarily because they were available and affordable. "Grow light" florescent lights would have been more optimized for plant growth spectrum output but were more expensive.
In the early 1990's LED systems were developed in Wisconsin for high intensity blue lights. Red and Blue LED arrays were used for experimental plant growth racks on the Space Shuttle. These were very expensive ( more than $ 1K) at the time and the cost precluded their use by schools. Now that LED technologies are much less expensive we are interested in using this technology to provide a low energy consumption plant lighting system with blue and red spectral range outputs which optimize plant growth.

We are also interested in looking at the utilization of light energy by photo-reactive pigments and how photo synthetic flux can be delivered most efficiently. We have used a strobe light as a lighting source for plant growth in a bucket growth chamber with good results. Pulsed lighting is an area of experimentation to explore which may further reduce energy consumption for plant lighting systems.

In Situ/ Analog Materials
Another area of interest is the use of in situ materials for plant growth. As the Russian scientist Vernadsky noted of Earth, the whole planet was transformed by the life processes in the biosphere from the creation of a substantial oxygen fraction of the atmosphere, to the formation of limestone beds and fossil deposits of coal. The creation of soils from in situ materials found on the Moon is a challenge for the establishment of complex Earthly environmental systems on the Moon. We recognize that hydroponics offer an efficient means of growing food plants and will no doubt be the dominant early technology used on the Moon. However, the complex diversified ecosystems that characterize the Earth's surface are soil based and our ability to settle other places in the solar system will require the development of soils and complex ecosystems based on in situ materials in addition to hydroponics.

The early Lunax experiments used Minnesota Lunar Simulent as a substrate for plant growth. More recently the lunar soil simulant, JSC #1, produced by Orbitec in Madison Wisconsin has been used and is more affordable. We understand that finely ground basalt does not constitute an optimum medium for plant growth but use of analog materials can be used to explore how such materials can be colonized by plants. The use of organic
amendments, hydroponic nutrient solutions, and microorganisms are all aspects of investigation. At the College of the Menominee Nation in Green Bay, Dan Hawk and I have also explored using iron mine tailings as another affordable analog material. This fine grained material presents challenges to plant growth both in consideration of its structural characteristics and compsition. In additional, the connection with native American agricultural traditions at CMN has also lead to using pyrogenic carbon as an amendment material to analog materials. This could be a means of recycling surplus biomass in a lunar environment.

Exo/Extreme environment Investigations
It has been proposed that plant growth in a lunar setting may be very feasible in a partial pressure atmosphere. While the merits and demerits of this approach can be debated there is also an interest in the adaptability of food plants to a high elevation environment on Earth. Dr. Cindy Schmidt of Divide, Colorado has been collaborating with us in exploring plant adaptation to a green house environment at 9,800 ft altitude. This work may have implications for food production by native populations which have been forced into places of marginal
agricultural productivity at high altitude such as in Tibet, or in the Andes Mountains. Similarly we have begun collaboration with Dr. Gertrude Koening, of El Paso Texas on the adaption of succulent plants to analog materials.

WEB Collaborations
Since the Lunax Project was started in the early 1990's the growth of the internet has made web based collaborations a new paradigm in science education. It seem most appropriate to share the interests of the Moon Society (and the Milwaukee Lunar Reclamation Society group that originally developed Lunax) in the investigation of issues pertinent to the development of lunar agriculture with a broader educational community over the web.

Dan Hawk and I are proposing to build on the connections established with the College of the Menominee Nation to expand to a larger network of Tribal Colleges and collaboration with the AISES network. We also wish to continue our work with science teacher Ron richardson and middle school students at the Alain Locke charter school in Chicago and to provide for an expanded network of participation with the CPS system.

These experimental topics can provide a varied context for science teaching and for the collaboration of science teachers and students. The use of a web context to share information and ideas about student engagement, cost effective experimental techniques and equipment, and experimental results can increase the impact of the second generation Lunax project. We welcome the interest and participation of science educators in these endeavors and see this as an "open source" and "open architecture" effort.