The secret to growing food on Mars could be fungi

Imagine arriving on Mars as part of the fourth human mission to the Red Planet and being asked to establish the first self-sustaining food supply for a permanent settlement. The plan depends on beneficial fungi, microorganisms that could help improve Martian regolith enough for crops to grow. Success could reduce the need to ship food from Earth and, in this imagined scenario, even earn you a high school named in your honor.

That vision may still be decades away, but researchers in the United States and Brazil are already examining whether fungi could make space agriculture more practical. In a review recently published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences , the team explored how beneficial fungi might help convert hostile lunar and Martian regolith into a more biologically suitable material for growing crops.

Fungi Could Help Make Space Regolith Farmable