ESA wants to grow flowers on the Moon

"They bring their own nutrients with them, you don't need any resources from the soil," he told me on the fringes of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) conference last week.

"Also, we have looked at other types of plant like the mustard plant Arabidopsis; it's a very resistant plant, its genome has been fully sequenced.

"So you could do experiments where you see what does it take to adapt it to another planet, where are those characteristics encoded in the genome, and so make hard science but also make technical applications of what types of plant could be engineered to better survive in these conditions, and what type of plants could be engineered to adapt to very extreme conditions, even having the possibility later to find applications on Earth as well." You can read more over at BBC.