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If the next few decades go well, humans could find themselves living and working far from Earth on the Moon or Mars. We’ll need a lot of raw materials to support human efforts on other planets, and a new project on the International Space Station (ISS) demonstrates how we can make space mining more efficient by 400%. All you need is a bacterial home care kit.
Everything we send into orbit has a cost and the numbers are not small. The cheapest option currently available, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, costs $ 1,500 per kilogram of payload. And this is a discounted wholesale rate. If you’re looking to send something smaller into space, the Falcon 9 costs around $ 2,700 per kilogram. Naturally, this makes collecting resources in space an attractive option, a process known as using in situ resources.
On Earth, bacteria are responsible for releasing minerals like iron and magnesium trapped in rocks, making them easier to extract. Some mining operations have also turned to bacteria to reduce the use of toxic chemicals, a process called biomining. The lack of such bacteria in space could make an already risky mining operation even more difficult, but a team at the University of Edinburgh has spent the past ten years developing technology that shows how we could harness bacteria to make the same work on the moon or Mars.
The team created small devices the size of a matchbook called biomining reactors, and 18 of them were sent to the ISS in July 2019 for testing in low-gravity environments. The aim was to determine whether bacteria would have the same weathering effects of rocks on the Moon or on Mars. The reactors contained a solution rich in one of several bacterial species, or without any bacteria as a control. Along with bacteria, each reactor contained a piece of volcanic basalt, a type of rock common on the Moon and containing minerals that can be released by bacteria.
According to the Nature Communications study, the ISS crew did not note a significant difference in the weathering function of bacteria’s rocks with simulated gravity from Mars, simulated gravity from Earth, or microgravity from Mars. the station. While two of the three bacteria didn’t have much of an effect on the weather, testing on a bacteria called Sphingomonas desiccabilis showed a huge boost. These organisms were able to increase the availability of minerals in the reactor between 111.9 and 429.2 percent compared to controls.
The researchers also noted that bacterial concentrations reached the same levels under all of the severity conditions tested, likely because they contained a lot of nutrients. This means that bio-mining in space is feasible, provided you can feed your bacterial helpers well. Returning mined material to Earth is currently not economically viable, but bioexploitation could help maintain a long-term human presence in space.
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