The "Moon Trees"

It's good to see an old NASA page that hasn't been destroyed by the "web modernization" pushes. I was looking for information on human landing site selection recently and the bitrot due to "modernization" there is extreme. I also saw a lot of this from the inside while working at JPL. Insufficient care is taken to preserve old pages and URLs are rarely preserved in upgrades. (And this story is a fun one -- I think I learned about it in a Radiolab podcast which is worth a listen)

Edit: Oh shoot just realized this page is by Dave Williams. I worked with him on MoonDiff. He's great. He also maintains pages about lunar impact flashes.

They did it again in 2022 (https://www.nasa.gov/history/moon-trees/). I think these species have "orthodox seeds", meaning they tolerate drying out and are resistant to cold temperatures. Also, the radiation dose must have been small. The crew's reported average dose was 1.14 rad. In tree mutation breeding they hit seeds with thousands of rads.