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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."
wow that is such a fluff piece, it says that the actual information will be released later on, it doesn't mention the species of plants looked at, it doesn't explain much other then they look at byproducts and that they want to help the crew survive... :) where is the geeky stuff?
a good candidate for the mission. I guess travaling that far can be boring .
Spam... Comes in a small can, and tastes great. As a good long-term food source, it's great--just ask me. The poor university student. :(
I wonder if someone will smuggle pot seeds onboard...
Why can't we just eat at the Starbucks that will be there by the time we get there.
It seems to me that taking the lamps, dirt, and space needed for the plants to grow would be less efficient than simply filling the space with canned food. I suppose it depends on the time they are taking; I wonder how many growing seasons they will have on the way to mars.
I hate my sig
Actually, smoking in such a limited atmosphere might overload the air handlers. Brownies would probably be a much better idea.
E pluribus unum
I vote that we fix SS, healthcare for all, edcation for all AND mars.
We just have to stop bombing so many people to pay for it.
Yes, abandon all work towards the future until we can handle the present. Society has gotten to where we are today by continually looking towards the future. Plus, solutions NASA develops frequently benefit the general public in unexpected ways.
...fifty years from now, we find that the only plants that would grow on Mars are ragweed and poison ivy.
ardustry
About the time I stopped smoking, pot had gotten a lot more powerful, and the kids were calling it "chronic" or "polio". Has it gotten powerful enough to call it "suspended animation"?
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.
zucchinia beans
garlic
kudzu
black beans
trumpet vine
sweet potato
bamboo
red beans
spider plant
black-eye beans
redwood
dill
onion
mustard
catnip
fav
stinging nettle
cabbage
thistle
dandilion
Actually, just making plain old canabutter would probably be a more effective way of doing it.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
This is the real barrier to owning our own back yard. Fortunately, the technology is something that is not out of reach. It is something that can come to fruition in the next few decades. then you can grow your own food where-ever you happen to be at.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Hate me!
Besides, where would they put the 2 tonnes of Cheetos required for the trip?
So, they'll have only vegeterians in the space crews. :-)
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Weight, reliability, and cost perhaps? If they can find a set of plants that will do the job on zero-G, it'll weigh less, be relatively reliable, and the component parts (water, nutrients, etc.) may be recyclable to some extent. Seems like it has the potential to be an elegant solution.
...a 1 cent coffee, and a $6.99 paper cup :)
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.
Look, every society that looks inwards ends up decaying. There are no solutions for all of societies ills. It is the reason why Communism will never work. Mankind is its own worse enemy. By looking outwards and expanding to the stars, we will increase economically as well as improve our own conditions. Think about when America prospered. Our greatest times where probably during the late 50's until late 60's. A big part of that was doing things such NASA, but in the right way. Now, NASA is just a tool that is being bantered about by politicians to be used to improve their own voting records, but not necessarily the USA.
Bush's ideas of not shooting for Mars, but going to the moon, all but guarentees that we will have enormous costs for a long time. The moon has no real resources. But even if Kerry gets in, I think that we are still in trouble. Our best chance at this is the X-Prize being moved into y-prize and z-prize, etc. With Paul Allens interest in the future, he is funding a number of space related things as well. I suspect that he will be able to get some commercially viable companies on to new ground. Literally. In fact, if the private Russia trip really is shooting for Mars happens, I think that it probably has Allen's backing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You're right! Brownies don't give off much smoke. They keep going out!
Yeah, if you've got a Brookstone near you, they carry them... or search the site for "ecosphere"...
http://www.brookstone.com/
The list posted above cannot possibly be correct. Maybe they should get Martha Stewart on this one. She's good with recipes and used to living in confined spaces.
Stuff that matters.
Would anybody know if there are any plants here on Earth that could survive on Mars itself? Not in some closed dome but in the actual atmosphere?
If we ever want to have successful Mars colonization then we also have to perform some terrafroming there; I can't imagine too many people wanting to live their whole lives in a cramped, closed environment. Creating some oxygen in the atmosphere would probably be essential for such an endeavour but would it be possible with anything that we've got today?
When men used to be men
...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
I remember a few years back, there was a comment on growing algae in space. While some forms of algae are edible ,I would hardly think anyone would want to consume it. However, it is known that growing algae in a vacuum can produce hydrogen. Growing other species of algae within a pressurized environment can produce oxygen. What would be excellent is if the astronauts could not only "grow" their food supply and life support, but also "grow" their fuel.0 0c.html
http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/NP02-24-20
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
Hey, why not, I have a few more for the list then
professional sports addicts
video game addicts
stock traders
politicians
TV couch spuds
mindless order followers in the "destructive arts and in-humanities"
all them "other guys" who ain't *you* based on ethnicity or religion or whatnot
Seems like there was a pretty big eugenics experiment, "bumping off the unproductives", carried out in the last century, but then goodwins law kicks in to mention it. whoops, just did it. Oh well, it seemed to have had a few problems associated with it, or perhaps you missed that part.
Careful what you list as unproductive, chances are you will fall on someone else's list then
"By far not all of them are suitable for space expedition."
I have a vision of a potted tomato plant strapped to the centrifuge chair...
OK, call me ignorant, but... You can actually get high by EATING weed?
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
In my experience "N/A" usually means "An embarassingly large amount"
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Even though the article was lacking in what anyone could consider detail, hell I would even hesitate to call it an article, one of the points in this research is for the recycling of oxygen and water, its not just about food.
Plants do an incredible job of purifying and recycling both air and water, and because of the growth rate and adaptability of many plants I think their problem will actually be in stemming the tide of mutation. Life evolves to fill whichever niche it can. And plants do it very very rapidly.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that out of the 3 choices, using the plants as a food source will be the last thing they do. They're much more valuable generating oxygen, as they do that through their entire lifespan, and are generally only suitable for eating near the end of their lifespan. It's much easier to tweak the size of your algea garden to produce more oxygen than it is to order new parts from home when you're several million km away from the nearest UPS store.
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
i couldn't find anything on pressure thresholds, but there is an article talking about how turgor pressure effects plant growth. turgor is a biology term that princeton defines better than i do. i'd imagine that the turgor pressure corresponds to atmospheric pressure in slightly different ratios species-to-species... The article also talks about yield threshold, which i think is just the output of good crop. here is more info on what plants NASA wants to grow for their astronauts ( wheat, rice, lettuce, cabbage, soy, potatoes, and others ) and some issues that they are facing ( one article mentions nuts and fruits are difficult ). too bad NASA is really buries their information...
A-Day
I was talking to someone who was in a position to know things about the Biosphere 2 project. (I forget who, but at the time I put a "valid information" mental bookmark on the conversation, how's *that* for a citation? 8-)
The two major reasons for failure of the project were related to plant choice and layout. In short, they chose american-friendly plants and "arranged them attractively" for the press. They made little brookes and tiny farms. In short they tried to "make a little planet of happy foods". They had a "rainforest room" and so on.
This was unforgivable, and purely political (as in political infighting).
I beleive the "major" cuplret was either wheat or rice. Whatever the plant was it grew "too fast" and far too much of the plant produced was "useless" with a long decay period (e.g. it was wasteful and recycled slowly).
Biosphere 2 was not really an attempt at much of anything. The kind of "closed system" needed for space travel isn't that hart to imagine, but it would be pretty ugly. Lots of dark greens, hydroponics, stacked growing racks, fungus, human-waste recycling, etc. Not so much a well-stocked biosphere as a bunch of plants which are geared to supporting one kind of animal (humans, duh 8-) all in a greasy and stark but well lit arangement.
As stated elsewhere, plants are quite predatory (sorry vegans, plants engage in a progrom of murder, life is tough, get over it... 8-) and often toxic. Most of the friendly plants we eat have a whole lot of plant we don't eat made along with each unit of food.
One would almost imagine a lot of sugar-plants and kale and one-each from the staple vitamin producers and a big blender to pulp up a paste. Then 400+ days of paste...
The ubiquetous but boring "food cube" of science fiction.
Then a fliter membrane from hell for the waste-to-water and waste-to-firtilizer transaction without all the nice "dirt".
I'd expect it to reek.
But I'd go. Eating sucks anyway so a uniform diet of paste would be little worse than what some people live with anyway. (can you say 20 years of Ensure, some people can...)
My only limit? No annis (lic.. lik... liqu... whatever... I can't even spell that the name of that nasty black candy, but the flavor sucks...).
One of the odd-out things they will have to invent is the "recycleable" air filter media. Basically you will need "activated charcoal" but you will have refresh it. Actually activated charcoal wouldnt' be that hard to manufacture in a closed system if you used some sort of condensate system to recapture the off-gassed nastyness when "burning" the charcoal. Then filter the air with it and "burry it" but desolving the "used" charcoal in the hydroponic solution.
eh... maybe...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
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I didn't really know. 2ndly. When I afterwards, went to their website they only had locations in 33 countries. [Out of over hundred of countries, so NO in most countries people haven't seen a starbucks.]
And I simply made a guess based on what I've heard in slashdot, so what kind of shops they actually are. [They atleast give coffee based on their website, but do they really sell food too?]
There is perhaps a reason why there is no starbucks in Finland. We have VERY strong coffee brands, in Finland, and every hosehold has coffee machine, where people make their own coffee.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.