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BACTERIA COULD IMPROVE THE ELIMINATION OF RARE EARTH ELEMENTS OF BASALT IN LUNAR AND MARTIAN LANDSCAPES UP TO AROUND 400%
Small chunks of basalt, a rock commonly found on Earth’s natural satellite and the red planet, were loaded into each device and immersed in a bacterial solution for three weeks under conditions of space gravity.
The team’s findings suggest that bacteria could enhance the removal of rare earth elements from basalt in lunar and Martian landscapes by up to 400%.
“Our experiments support the scientific and technical feasibility of biologically enhanced elemental mining throughout the Solar System,” said Charles Cockell, lead author of the paper, in a press release. “While it is not economically viable to extract these elements in space and bring them to Earth, space biomining could support a self-sustaining human presence in space.”
According to Cockell, the experiment shows that it may be possible to build robotic and human-controlled mines in the Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon, which has rocks with enriched concentrations of rare earth elements.
“[This] it could be a fruitful direction of human scientific and economic development beyond Earth ”, said the scientist.
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