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A Martian Garden

By Sandra Markle

Earthlings, prepare to be amazed: New Zealand scientist Michael Mautner at Lincoln University has grown the world’s first Martian vegetables! The tiny asparagus and potato plants didn’t arrive on a spaceship. They are the first plants to grow successfully in Martian soil, here on Earth. Mautner was interested in exploring whether, in the future, human colonies on Mars might be able to raise crops there.

So how did Mautner get soil from Mars? He made it by grinding up slices of two Martian meteorites-chunks of rock that had landed on Earth from the Red Planet. One was found in the Sahara Desert, the other in Antarctica. Both the wide-open desert and the big expanse of ice are good places for spotting meteorites.

Not many meteorites come from Mars, but Mautner was able to confirm that his did. Tests showed that they contained tiny bubbles of trapped gas. That gas had nearly the same chemical makeup as the Martian atmosphere studied in the late 1970s by the U.S. Viking spacecraft.

Before planting, Mautner analyzed the rocks. He was delighted to find high levels of phosphates and nitrates-chemicals that plants need to grow. "It’s like the Martian soil is naturally fertilized," he explains. He mixed ground-up rock with water and put pinhead-size bits of asparagus and potato plants into the mixture. In a few weeks the plants grew a couple of inches tall. Plants grown in the Martian soil were larger and healthier than others grown in water alone or in water mixed with ground-up Hawaiian lava rock.

"It was exciting to see the vegetables grow so well in Martian soil," Mautner says. "In the future, people starting a colony on Mars could use the soil there to grow food."

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