Lighting Technologies For Space Farming

dlkf writes: "Space.com has an excellent article discussing current technologies in light sources for growing plants in space. ".. .the high-tech lighting systems here have been used to grow potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce, spinach, radishes, wheat onion and a whole plethora of herbs such as marjoram and parsley." The main problems for the lighting sources were energy usage, lifetime of light source and heat generation. To address these issues researchers are using both LED and microwave technology." The electrical advantages of LED growlamps may soon become manifest here on Earth, too.

Comments

Re:Light sources and heat sinks.

[Winged Cat]

What if you get nuclear (or whatever) energy from resources on-site? Say, a Martian geothermal plant, with the output gasses vented to help build the atmosphere. Or a helium-3 fusion plant, where the helium-3 is mined from the Moon (inefficiency of lifting from Earth aside, there just plain isn't that much helium-3 down here).

You're right, using sunlight directly makes sense if we are using sunlight to begin with. And that's a good option. But not the only one.