Growth and Development of Ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana: Preliminary Experiments to Prepare for a Moon Lander Mission

NASA is planning to launch robotic landers to the Moon as part of the Artemis lunar program. We have proposed sending a greenhouse housed in a 1U CubeSat as part of one of these robotic missions. A major issue with these small landers is the limited power resources that do not allow for a narrow temperature range that we had on previous spaceflight missions with plants. Thus, the goal of this project was to extend this temperature range, allowing for greater flexibility in terms of hardware development for growing plants on the Moon. Our working hypothesis was that a mixture of ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana from colder and warmer climates would allow us to have successful growth of seedlings. However, our results did not support this hypothesis as a single genotype, Columbia (Col-0), had the best seed germination, growth, and development at the widest temperature range (11–25 °C). Based on results to date, we plan on using the Columbia ecotype, which will allow engineers greater flexibility in designing a thermal system. We plan to establish the parameters of growing plants in the lunar environment, and this goal is important for using plants in a bioregenerative life support system needed for human exploration on the Moon.