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Green Plants for Mars Mission
An anonymous reader writes "NASA doesn't keep back that they are going to send a human expedition to Mars in a couple of decades. One of the obstacles for the longstanding 35-million-mile voyage is a food production. NASA researchers have focused on 20 plant species that NASA believes could be grown during a flight to Mars and after landing on the fourth planet from the Sun. By far not all of them are suitable for space expedition."
First of all, I highly doubt they're going to use "dirt". Hydroponic growth medium of some sort I might imagine.
Second of all, the plants serve a dual purpose: food and oxygen replenishment. Cans don't change carbon dioxide into oxygen. They can't.
Third, space needed depends on the plant. Maybe they'll use algae, which is a plant.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Anyway, it'll be kind of a drag being locked up on earth for a few months in a small closed environment - but I wouldn't trust relying on plants any other way.
..........FULL STOP.
Interesting, and as a gardener with farmers and nutritionists for friends, believable. Where did you obtain this list? (uncited, so not really informative, mods)
Sweet potato is a large plant, lots of beta carotene. A few of these plants are very heavy feeders, but rapid growers. Nettle is a nutritional secret: you can almost live on the stuff alone. Spider plant is a heavy breather. Not many people know that kudzu is good for you, or that dandelion used to be a cultivated staple in european gardens--you use the whole plant.
Catnip, redwood, trumpet vine, and thistle are headscratchers, though. Medicine, wood, and mulch?
Damn those pesky terrorists
Interesting to note in that story that they mention low-pressure growing environments to reduce structural stresses. If you've ever been up to super-high altitude places like the Andes or Himalayan valleys, you'll see some massive vegetables, because of the strong sun and carefully managed micro-climates. I wonder what the pressure threshold is for typical vegetables to thrive.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Why not just fill a capsule with seeds from every plant on earth and have it crash into Mars about 20 years before we go there? Anything that can grow, will grow, and we'll find out what works without a bunch of expensive and potentially futile research. Like they say in Jurassic Park, "Nature will find a way". :)
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
...some of the simpler plants like algae (blue green) and chlorella and some of the yeasts are a good choice. Rapid growth cycles, easy to grow, extremely nutritious and because they come in tiny single cell size they are highly digestible. Probably the best bet for a closed cycle system, to get the most calories for the effort.
Too add to the list down below, I'll throw in a few I know are very nutritious and fast growers,and also able to take some extreme environmental conditions, efficient in other words
lambs quarters
purslane
kale
bunching onions
along the same lines, chives
sweet clover
There's some other fast growers and tougher plant candidates but they are nastier tasting, like some of the lichens. If they had enough light and a salt water/mineral mix tank, dulse might be a good choice as well.
Left out things that would be too hard to grow in an enclosed small place, there's quite a few really. In normal cultured gardening, there are just hundreds of candidates probably, it really *is* a variable that would be determined on space available and how much water is available, light available, and that is about it. Modern vegetables are pretty good at being *food*, most of them have been very successfully bred over the generations to be fast growers, etc, they just need a *lot* of water and root and foliar space, and a lot of them are not edible until they achieve a large size, or are not practical because of length of time for seed to seed. I would assume that is what is the big drawback to what the selections might be. For example, corn is tasty, but only medium nutritious, takes a huge amount of resources and space, and even the fastest corn is still weighing in at about two months growing time. Off the list. The radishes though, heck ya, about perfect. I think their primary criteria would have to be a fast generational cycle and having most of the plant be edible. And they could always do just sprouts, dried grains and seeds are fairly compact and already being mostly dehydrated they are efficient to launch weight wise, and after sprouting they have activated enzymes which make them a lot more nutritous than the mature plant. It's a small window with sprouts, usually about until they get their first real leaves, as opposed to the bud leaves.
Personally, I think they should make an executive decision that YES INDEEDY (that's my official vote anyway) we as humans are going to colonise mars, and that will entail dragging our crops with us, so they should just go ahead and start terraforming now by introducing the simpler plants in the hopes they might adapt. I know that is controversial, but that's the only thing rational if you are serious about colonization at any time in the future. No sense wasting time then if you choose "yes". Robot probes could be the advanced gardeners, even if all they did was set up greenhouses and get a few of the simpler crops up and growing before the humans showed up.
When previous historical explorers traveled, they took the means to self perpetuate their food supply, they took seeds and livestock with them. They didn't know what would be "out there" so they couldn't take a chance on a very long and hazardous journey and then get stuck with no food eventually. they did the only thing logical at the time, they traveled with a "farm in a box". If they had had the ability to send that "farm in a box" stuff FIRST, ahead of their voyages,they would have done so. We can do that now with the next stage of human exploration, so, IMO, we probably should.
Yes, aware of the risks of "contamination". I don't consider it contamination, I consider it rational cultivation. I don't want Mars and exploration to be limited to a few academic hands off pursuits,look but no touch action in other words, I want it eventually open for joe human to go there and live if he chooses to. Open source colonization, not closed source propietary.
That will obviously mean then that we will be haulin
In my experience "N/A" usually means "An embarassingly large amount"
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