TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Pure underground caverns on the moon might be used to retailer frozen samples of Earth’s species so as to defend biodiversity within the occasion of world disaster, in keeping with a College of Arizona scientist and his college students.
Jekan Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, and 5 of his college students introduced a paper earlier this month on the idea throughout the worldwide IEEE Aerospace Convention, which was held just about this 12 months, the Arizona Day by day Star reported.
Thanga mentioned the underground organic repository would function a backup copy of frozen seeds, spores, sperm and egg samples from most Earth species. The specimens could be stored secure contained in the caves carved by molten lava a whole bunch of ft beneath the floor of the moon.
The caves, some giant sufficient to carry a 30-story constructing, will be reached by rocket from Earth in 4 to 5 days and supply an setting basically undisturbed for the previous 3 to 4 billion years, scientists mentioned.
College doctoral candidate Álvaro Díaz-Flores Caminero and undergraduate scholar Claire Pedersen have been the lead authors of the paper. They mentioned the thought got here from the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, however as an alternative of two of each animal the lunar ark would retailer 50 samples from every of the chosen species in a high-tech archive manned by robots and powered with photo voltaic panels. The group has been researching concepts amid world disaster for at the least seven years.
“There’s nothing like that on planet Earth. There’s nothing as safe,” Thanga mentioned, including that it serves as “an insurance coverage coverage” within the occasion of world disaster.
Thanga estimates that it may take as little as 5 years and 15 area launches to create the repository.
Thanga additionally mentioned it might be much like that of the Svalbard Seed Financial institution, an present repository in Norway that holds a whole bunch of 1000’s of plant samples. As a substitute, the one on the moon would maintain as many as 1 million completely different seed packets.
The group hopes to ship 6.7 million species to the moon, representing as much as 90% of all identified vegetation and animals, minus these that can’t be cryogenically preserved, he mentioned. It’s unclear what’s going to occur to the samples as soon as on the moon.
“We wish to reserve it for a time when we have now the expertise to (re)deploy it,” he mentioned. “As a result of as soon as it’s misplaced it’s misplaced without end. There’s no approach of getting it again.”
Thus far, work on the thought has been funded by means of a grant by NASA. The group has introduced plans to launch extra particulars as they conduct extra analysis, together with how the samples may react to long-term storage in microgravity.
Díaz-Flores Caminero, a doctoral scholar who co-wrote the primary paper on the idea, welcomes the problem. “Multidisciplinary tasks are exhausting resulting from their complexity. However I feel the identical complexity is what makes them stunning,” he mentioned.
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