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UC Davis Students Present Plan For Mars Greenhouse To NASA
Photo courtesy of UC Davis
Students were asked to design a greenhouse to support four astronauts over the course of a two-year stay on Mars.
April 30, 2019
Edited by Chris Manning
A student team from the UC Davis Space and Satellite Systems club was one of five university teams invited to present their plans for a Mars greenhouse at the NASA Langley Research Center on April 23rd.
“We all had an amazing experience learning from other teams’ ideas and interacting with professional engineers as well as fellow students,” said team member Lucas Brown, a freshman in aerospace engineering.
The UC Davis students entered the Martian Agricultural and Plant Sciences (MAPS) project for this year’s BIG Idea Challenge, organized by the National Institute of Aerospace in collaboration with NASA. Their goal: to design a greenhouse to support four astronauts during a two-year stay on Mars. The design needed to relate to the “Mars Ice Home” concept, an inflatable structure that would arrive on Mars before the crew and be partly assembled automatically. The walls of the ice home and greenhouse would be filled with water, frozen solid in Martian conditions, for structure and protection from radiation.
Dartmouth College placed first among the five finalists with MIT taking second place, NASA announced Wednesday. Unlike most of the other competitors, the UC Davis team was made up entirely of undergraduates, many of them freshmen and sophomores.
Developing the proposal took the team in a wide variety of directions, from soil chemistry and irrigation to interplanetary law.
“We’re all engineers, but we’re all going well outside our scope,” said team lead Duha Bader, a sophomore majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering.
“It’s cool that it’s an intersection of agriculture and engineering — I never thought I would be studying irrigation systems,” Brown said.
The UC Davis proposal made use of Martian soil for growing plants, while the other competitors used hydroponic systems. The team assessed the pros and cons of both approaches and found that while hydroponics might be easier to set up, a soil-based greenhouse would be more resilient and have other long-term benefits for the mission beyond providing fresh food.
“There is stress relief in growing plants, it has recreational and mental benefits,” said Journey Byland, sophomore in aerospace engineering, who designed the soil-processing system.
Martian soil would be collected, sterilized with an electron beam to remove any Martian microbes — just in case they exist — and treated with water to remove perchlorates, toxic chemicals common in Martian dirt.
Growing soybeans mixed with nitrogen-fixing bacteria would enrich the soil. Plant waste would be burnt to ash and put back into the soil; earthworms (from Earth) would help mix the soil and keep it healthy.
The team considered, but rejected, using human waste to enrich the soil like fictional astronaut Mark Watney did in the novel The Martian by Andy Weir. The potential health problems are too complicated with a multi person crew, they said.
A 1967 United Nations treaty calls on member states to avoid contamination of other planets with Earth microbes, or bringing alien microbes into the Earth environment. The agreements and NASA policies stemming from the “Outer Space Treaty” mean that all the Martian soil coming into the greenhouse has to be sterilized and that at the end of the mission, the greenhouse’s plants must all be destroyed and thoroughly sterilized. Winning competitors are eligible for NASA summer internships.
Additional team members include: Audrey Chamberlin, freshman in aerospace engineering; Isabella Elliot, freshman in aerospace engineering; Jackson Liao, sophomore in aerospace engineering; Cory George, senior in aerospace engineering; and Nancy Juarez, sophomore in international agricultural development. Professor Stephen K. Robinson, chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and a former astronaut, was faculty advisor to the team.
Extraterrestrial Ecosystem
With long-term space missions and a potential colonization of Mars in mind, Dr. Robert Ferl of the UF Space Plants Lab studies how plants grow beyond Earth.
March 26, 2019
Patrick Williams
Dr. Robert Ferl (left) and Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul (right), principal investigators of the University of Florida Space Plants Lab, outside the EDEN ISS growing module in Antarctica Photos courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul
In The Future, Plants Could Play A Key Role in Space Exploration
An “earth ship” en route to Mars would need plants to sustain life by recycling air, water and human waste, and producing oxygen and food, says Dr. Robert Ferl, distinguished professor at the University of Florida (UF) and director of the university’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research.
“There is very much a realization that long-term space missions — anything that lasts more than a year or two years — it’s going to be hard to take enough good food,” Ferl says. “Biological reconditioning of all of our waste and nutrients, and production of food, is really a long-term, very realistic goal of the space exploration agenda.”
There is very much a realization that long-term space missions — anything that lasts more than a year or two years — it’s going to be hard to take enough good food."
— Dr. Robert Ferl
As one of the two principal investigators of the UF Space Plants Lab, Ferl, who works alongside the other principal investigator, Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul, focuses on genetically engineering plants and researching them in spaceflight. In February, he and Paul returned from a trip to the EDEN ISS growing module in Antarctica. They have been in parabolic flights in aircraft; sent plants to the International Space Station (ISS) and on the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic suborbital flights; and, every summer from 2006 through 2012, worked at the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse on the uninhabited, cratered and Red Planet-esque Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
By sending plants to space and studying outer space’s impact on plants, scientists such as Ferl and Paul are trying to expand our knowledge of how plants can grow in extreme environments. Ferl says understanding how plants grow in space can improve our understanding of how they grow on Earth. And if humans need or choose to colonize Mars someday, it will help with that, too.
A budding interest in sending plants to space
Ferl became intrigued by sending plants to space because of what he calls a “pretty simple” progression of events. Working in molecular biology, he tries to understand how genes work, including which genes make some plants one color versus another, and what makes some plants survive while others die.
In the mid-1990s, Ferl was studying plant tolerance to flooding and flooding gene expression. Plants were being sent into space at the time and coming back, it appeared, stressed, almost as if they had been underwater. That is when Ferl became interested in working with the space program.
“Our proximity to the Kennedy Space Center and our interest in gene expression and plants in strange environments really all coalesced in the middle to late 1990s to suggest that we can learn a lot about plants — plant reactions to environmental conditions and plant productivity — by studying plants in space,” Ferl says. “And conversely, if we learned how to grow plants in space really well, we’d learn how to feed people on extended spaceflight environments.”
Seedlings growing on the International Space Station above EarthPhoto courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul
Spaceflight experiments
Ferl is interested in questions addressing the limits of biology, such as if organisms can survive in space without gravity or other environmental conditions on Earth. He says it is a possibility that people will eventually colonize Mars, and by that point, astronauts will need to know how to use plants at their maximum potential.
“I’m really interested in asking the question, ‘How can we make our plants most beneficial to us, using every photon, using every electron of energy that’s produced by the system, every volume, every CO2 molecule and everything at the most efficient way possible?’” he says. “‘What can we do with plants, to plants or around plants to make them the most efficient biological life support system available?’”
In the early 2010s, Ferl and his colleagues used digital photograph imaging to watch Arabidopsis thaliana grow on the ISS, and they made an idiosyncratic discovery. Plant roots do something called “skewing,” where they find their way through soil and avoid objects, Ferl says. In his book “The Power of Movement in Plants,” Charles Darwin wrote that roots skew because of touching other objects. However, watching roots grow on the ISS, Ferl and other scientists found the roots skewing without gravity.
“In a very real sense, although not having to do with evolution, but still in a very real sense, we proved that Darwin was wrong,” Ferl says. “How many people can in their career say that they proved Darwin wrong? So, from a very simple observation of the directionality of root growth in space we changed the way that people have to think about root growth direction choices. I think that’s pretty cool.”
In researching how plants adapt to spaceflight, Ferl and his colleagues study processes such as gene expression in roots and leaves. They consider a stressful environment one where many genes in a plant must be activated, and a less stressful environment one where fewer genes must be activated. Responses to environmental stimuli may differ between plant varieties. “Can we select for varieties that grow well in microgravity?” Ferl asks. “Can we select for varieties that will do well in spaceflight vehicles?”
“What we’re learning, quite honestly, are some really interesting biochemical facts about that adaptive process,” he says. “One of them is, for example, that plants in the absence of gravity still know how to grow their roots away from their shoots. In other words, the shoots still grow to the light but actually the roots still grow down, away from the light, because they activate genes that let them light cues for determining that architecture, instead of gravity as the determinate.”
Inside the Future Exploration Greenhouse, part of the EDEN ISS project in AntarcticaPhoto courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul
From ice sheet to orbit
In Antarctica, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and other public and private organizations are growing produce in a module in Antarctica via the EDEN ISS project. There, agricultural engineers monitor photons of LED lights and amp hours of battery use to determine calorie count and feed people, Ferl says.
“Our role there is to use the kind of imaging and data collection that we use on the International Space Station to monitor plant development, and especially plant health, so that we can, as a remote science backroom, help troubleshoot any issues that the plants might have,” Ferl says. “[We can] help understand how plants might be adapting differently in that environment than they would here, and [figure out] how to maximize plant productivity in that highly closed, highly engineered environment that is truly dedicated to keeping people alive.”
Most of Ferl’s work involves Arabidopsis rather than ornamental crops or produce, but he says there are parallels between greenhouse production and the type of work he does. After all, commercial growers expect a lot out of their crops and need to understand how environment affects plant growth and health. Studying what growers and farmers do, and looking at natural processes on Earth, can influence scientists who research plants in space.
He asks: “What can we learn from the productivity of our farms, our fields, our forests, our ecology, that can help us drive towards a place where we maximize truly every photon of light coming in, every molecule of nutrient, and produce the least wasteful, most beneficial, food, fiber, water and oxygen available?” Greenhouse growers may help push space exploration ahead.
EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility Remains In Antarctica
The first EDEN ISS Antarctic mission (February – November 2018) aimed at advancing controlled environment agriculture technologies for plant cultivation in extreme conditions, applicable to both terrestrial earth and space exploration. In April 2019, the EU-funded project comes to a complete close with all research concluded, providing definitive results. Due to the advantages this unique learning platform offers, it has been decided to extend research missions into 2021.
Partner institutions German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), operators of the German Antarctic research center Neumayer Station III, will keep the analogue facility in operation for a minimum of two years until 2021, enabling two more isolation phases. Between January and February 2019, the facility was updated with repairs made to all subsystems where required. A complete cleaning of the greenhouse was performed preparing the facility for future research and analogue testing.
Researchers interested in taking advantage of the highly isolated conditions of Antarctica, remote monitoring and communication system, and/or the high-functioning systems architecture of the EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility are invited to contact Dr. Daniel Schubert to submit research proposals.
In April 2019, the EU-funded project comes to a close with first phase research concluded, providing definitive results. During the Antarctic mission, a significant amount of fruits and vegetables were produced in the Future Exploration Greenhouse and were a great benefit to the over-wintering crew at the Neumayer Station III. A large amount of plant and microbiological samples from within the greenhouse have been preserved and are currently being tested by project partners for determining further the quality and safety of the cultivated fruits and vegetables.
The EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility is comprised of two standard shipping containers fitted-out to accommodate a Future Exploration Greenhouse, a service section, a climatic buffer zone, and all the required subsystems for operating a controlled-environment greenhouse (including an LED Illumination System, Atmosphere Management System & Thermal Control System, a Nutrient Delivery System, and Plant Health Monitoring system, and an all-in-one hardware and software platform for monitoring and controlling all equipment and for communications between the Mission Control Centre in Bremen).
For more information:
EDEN ISS
eden-iss.net
Publication date: 5/2/2019
Astronauts Might Soon Grow SPACE Tomatoes
Tiny tomato plants developed at the University of California, Riverside, could one day feed astronauts on the International Space Station
Grant To UC Riverside Could Help Put Tiny Tomato
Plants On The International Space Station
Author: HOLLY OBER
April 25, 2019
Tiny tomato plants developed at the University of California, Riverside, could one day feed astronauts on the International Space Station. The plants have minimal leaves and stems but still produce a normal amount of fruit, making them a potentially productive crop for cultivation anywhere with limited soil and natural resources.
A tomato plant with more edible fruit than biomass could grow on the ISS. Credit: Martha Orozco-Cárdenas/UCR
Now, with a grant from the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, UCR researchers will tweak the tomatoes to make them also uniquely suited to growing in space. Dubbed Small Plants for spACe Expeditions, or SPACE, plants by the researchers, the technology could be applied to other plants to develop a suite of crops for agriculture on the International Space Station and future space colonies.
Robert Jinkerson, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering in the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering and Martha Orozco-Cárdenas, director of the Plant Transformation Research Center in the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, will use the two-year $800,000 grant to continue to reduce the size of the miniature plants, engineer them for enhanced photosynthesis, grow them in a container that mimics conditions on the International Space Station, analyze the fruit’s nutritional content, and conduct taste tests.
Orozco-Cárdenas originally used CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to shrink the size of ordinary tomato plants and reduce the ratio of leaves and stems to fruit.
“For several years I have been studying the family of genes involved in DNA repair, early response to stress, cell division, differentiation, and growth in plants. It was very exciting to see how a single base change in one of the genes can have such an impact on plant growth and development,” she said.
By 2050, there will be nine billion people on the planet, but arable land is decreasing. Global food production will need to double to meet the food needs by then. Climate change complicates the problem more.
“My goal has always been to develop crops that could feed a growing global population on less farmland,” Orozco-Cárdenas said.
Most fruit and vegetable plants produce more inedible leaves and stems, known as biomass, than edible fruit or vegetables. Small plants with more edible parts than biomass could produce large quantities of food on small plots and indoor spaces such as vertical urban farms. However, vertical farming systems tend to grow leafy greens because they have trouble supporting larger fruiting plants like tomatoes.
In addition to their small size, the UC Riverside tiny tomatoes minimize resource and energy consumption by producing fruit more quickly than conventional plants.
The traits that make the tomatoes suitable for growing in vertical urban farms on Earth, with a few small tweaks, could also make them suitable for growing on the International Space Station, where astronauts yearn for fresh fruit and vegetables.
“When I first saw those tiny tomatoes growing in Martha’s lab, I just knew we had to get them onto the space station,” Jinkerson said.
One necessary modification is to increase the rate of photosynthesis which allows the plants to produce oxygen and convert carbon dioxide into food. Enhanced photosynthesis will help replace carbon dioxide in space station air with fresh oxygen, improving the air quality and sustainability of human life in space.
These gene editing approaches can also be applied to many other crops for use here on Earth that could help feed the growing population and also bring humans one step closer to permanent settlements in space.
“Most plant research has already focused on optimizing crops for growth outside in fields, opening up a lot of opportunities to engineer plants for built environments like in space or greenhouses,” said Jinkerson.
(Header photo: The International Space Station. Credit: NASA)
Plants Might Thrive Better Than Humans in Space
Today, a half century after Neil Armstrong took one small step onto the surface of the moon, there are just three humans living in space: the crew of the International Space Station
From Algae to Lettuce, Agriculture
as Already Shown Promise Out of Orbit.
NICOLA TWILLEY CYNTHIA GRABER and GASTROPOD
April 28, 2019
Growing plants out of orbit will require a well-balanced "light recipe."THOMAS WHITE / REUTERS
Today, a half century after Neil Armstrong took one small step onto the surface of the moon, there are just three humans living in space: the crew of the International Space Station. But after decades of talk, government agencies and entrepreneurs are now drawing up more concrete plans to return to the moon, and even travel onward to Mars. Getting there is one thing, but if we plan to set up colonies, we’ll have to figure out how to feed ourselves. Will Earth crops grow in space—and, if so, will they taste different? Will we be sipping spirulina smoothies and crunching on chlorella cookies, as scientists imagined in the 1960s, or preparing potatoes 6,000 different ways, like Matt Damon in The Martian? Listen in this episode for the stories about how and what we might be farming once we get to Mars.
Space is harsh. We aren’t suited to the thinner atmospheres and lower gravitational pull of Mars or the moon, and without Earth’s atmosphere to protect us, cosmic rays could damage the structure of our cells, including our DNA. Plants, it seems, are a little tougher than humans when it comes to adapting to the rigors of alien worlds: According to the NASA scientist Ray Wheeler, scientists began sending algae into space in the 1950s, and since 2015, U.S. astronauts on the ISS have been able to enjoy the odd leaf of homegrown lettuce, thanks to the work of Wheeler’s Kennedy Space Center colleague Gioia Massa.
Read: How do plants grow in space?
One of the big leaps forward in space agriculture came little more than a decade ago with the introduction of broad-spectrum, affordable LED lights—these are now powerful, efficient, and cool enough to allow plants to be grown entirely indoors. In this episode, Gastropod visits Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the world leader in indoor farming, where the scientist Esther Meinen drew on her greenhouse expertise to select the crops and design the best “light recipe” for EDEN ISS, a European space-farming prototype that provided fresh herbs and vegetables to the crew of the Neumayer Antarctic station throughout the last polar winter.
Those radishes, celery, and tomatoes were all grown hydroponically, without soil. But plants love soil—and on Mars, the subsurface soil may even offer some water. So can we grow crops directly in Martian or moon dirt? As it turns out, although Apollo astronauts brought nearly a thousand pounds of rocky dust back from the surface of the moon, no one at NASA had ever used it to grow plants. The remaining lunar material is too precious for NASA to hand out, and we don’t even have soil from Mars. But a few years ago, Meinen’s colleague Wieger Wamelink decided to try growing plants using Martian- and lunar-soil simulants. In this episode, we visit his Martian test plot to learn about the challenges of exoplanetary terroir—and taste the results. And whether we get there or not, it turns out that figuring out how to grow plants in space has plenty to teach us about farming here on Earth.
Listen in this episode for the how, what, and why of space agriculture.
Asia: Grapes On Mars? Georgia Winemakers Aiming High
Georgia is immensely proud of its ancient wine-making tradition, claiming to have been the first nation to make wine. Now it wants to be the first to grow grapes on Mars
APRIL 10, 2019
TBILISI: Georgia is immensely proud of its ancient wine-making tradition, claiming to have been the first nation to make wine. Now it wants to be the first to grow grapes on Mars.
Nestling between the Great Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, Georgia has a mild climate that is perfect for vineyards and has developed a thriving wine tourism industry.
Now Nikoloz Doborjginidze has co-founded a project to develop grape varieties that can be grown on Mars.
“Georgians were first winemakers on Earth and now we hope to pioneer viticulture on the planet next door,” he told AFP.
After NASA called for the public to contribute ideas for a “sustained human presence” on the Red Planet, a group of Georgian researchers and entrepreneurs got together to propel the country’s winemaking onto an interplanetary level.
Marika Tarasashvili, an astrobiologist working on a project to develop grape varieties that can be grown on Mars, works at a laboratory in Tbilisi on Feb. 26, 2019, as Georgia claiming to be the first nation to make wine thousands of years ago, now wants to be the first to grow grapes on Mars. AFP / VANO SHLAMOV
Their project is called IX Millennium — a reference to Georgia’s long history of wine-making.
Since archaeologists found traces of wine residue in ancient clay vessels, the country has boasted that it has been making wine for 8,000 years — longer than any other nation.
IX Millennium is managed by a consortium set up by the Georgian Space Research Agency, Tbilisi’s Business and Technology University, the National Museum and a company called Space Farms.
While it might seem like the stuff of science fiction, the idea of humans quaffing wine on the fourth planet from the Sun is coming closer to reality.
NASA hopes to launch a manned mission to Mars within 25 years, while billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has set a goal of outstripping the US space agency by a decade.
‘Breakthrough’ results
One of the scientists working on the project, astrobiologist Marika Tarasashvili, is developing bacteria that could turn Martian soil into fertile earth.
Researchers had already achieved “breakthrough” results in experiments, she said, smiling, as she gazed into a glass vial with faux-Martian soil in a cramped Tbilisi laboratory.
The scientists collected bacteria from regions of Georgia with “extreme ecosystems” such as hot sulphurous springs, then bred strains capable of living in Martian conditions, she says.
The idea is for the bacteria to transform the lifeless surface of Mars into fertile soil “on which future colonists will be able to cultivate plants,” she said.
Tarasashvili and her colleagues are also testing the skins of Georgia’s 525 indigenous grape varieties to establish which are most resistant to the high levels of ultra-violet radiation hitting the Martian surface.
Preliminary results showed that pale-skinned Rkatsiteli grapes — a popular variety that produces white wines with crisp green-apple flavours — best endures ultra-violet rays.
“In the distant future, Martian colonists will be able to grow plants directly in Martian soil,” said Tusia Garibashvili, founder of Space Farms company, part of the IX Millennium project.
“But first we need to create a model of completely controlled sustainable Martian greenhouses.”
Her company is currently building a vertical farming laboratory, which she calls “the ideal technology for Martian agriculture of the future.”
The plants will grow in a special facility located inside a trendy Tbilisi hotel, laid out in vertically stacked layers with carefully controlled temperature, light and humidity.
The next step will be to test Georgian grape varieties in a simulated Martian environment in a laboratory now under construction at the Business and Technology University.
“Plants will be subjected to sub-zero [Celsius] temperatures, high levels of radiation and carbon monoxide [and] high-altitude air pressure,” said BTU Dean Nino Enukidze.
“Martian dreams aside, our experiments are providing information that is vital as humanity confronts a multitude of environmental challenges,” said Enukidze.
“We will be able to identify and breed food crops resistant to the problems caused by global climate change.”
AFP