Martian and Lunar Soil for growing plants and worms in the classroom – Teacher Pack – 8 pounds soil, seeds, nitrogen source

You get 8 one pound bags of simulant with free shipping.

Enough crop seeds for 30 students. These seeds are on the list of crops that have been successfully sprouted in planetary regolith.

A one pound bag of Alfalfa pellets. Add water to these horse pellets and then use them as a nitrogen source for your plants. This replaces the obvious choice of Poo that will be available to the Martians. Alfalfa Pellets same stuff – smells better.

A bag of earthly potting soil to conduct side by side tests with your planetary regoliths or have a control worm bed

Jump drive full of educator resources

My Mars and Lunar simulants are chemical matches of the original regolith analysis.

Lab made simulants will never be perfect copies of extraterrestrial regoliths especially Martian regolith because no samples have ever been returned to earth.

Our version of these simulants are made from powdered chemical elements, silica sand, crushed glass and a type of crushed basalt from the Jurassic Beds of Texas.

Because of the way our simulants are made there are ” well – simulated properties” and there are “Poorly-simulated properties” represented in my regoliths.

Well – simulated properties – Means that this element of the regolith mimics the original planetary regolith.

Poorly-simulated properties – Means that this element of the regolith is close to the original planetary regolith but is not an exact match of the rover analyses.

Some of the physical regolith properties will not be well represented in our simulants.

Well-simulated properties in my regoliths:

Bulk chemistry: We use dry chemicals and mix them by percentages of weight of the original published analysis. Our stimulants are a chemical match to the original rover analysis.

Volatile release. We have calculated the released gases from our simulants during heating. Our Martian simulant accurately captured the total amount of water released compared to the reference materials. Lunar simulants captured less moisture then the martian simulant.

Poorly-simulated properties in my regoliths:

Particle shape. We do not control the particle shapes in our simulants. Most of the processing involves course and fine silica sand, basalt, and crushed glass, going though a series of sieves, but the particle shapes may still not be course enough to 100% mimic lunar regolith.

Oxidation and weathering. Our simulants contain the percentages of ferric iron that is listed in the published data, however it is not sourced from any crushed rock so the amount of oxidation and weathering effects are unknown.

Trace elements and isotopes. We do not try to simulate trace elements, REEs, or isotopes in the regoliths

Hazardous components. Alamo Space Dirt simulants are made to be safe with adult supervision. we do not include perchlorates or other super oxide species in our simulants.

Reactivity. Extraterrestrial regolith may quickly react or change if exposed to a humid, oxygen-rich environment . Because we make the simulants on Earth, they are already equilibrated with the atmosphere, and adsorb only minor amounts of water vapor in humid conditions.

Tomatoes, Peas, And 8 Other Crops Have Been Grown in my Mars and Lunar regoliths 

In experiments testing how well crops grow on other planets, I have managed to harvest 10 crops, including tomatoes, peas, and rye, from regolith that mimics the conditions on Mars and the Moon

Although my Mars-equivalent soil produced slightly fewer crops than regular Earth soil, the difference wasn’t huge, suggesting that, in the right conditions, early settlers might be able to  feed themselves with crops grown on the Red Planet. The dream of a Martian colony just got a little bit closer.