Sending humans to Mars is not an easy task in itself, but it will be much more difficult to establish a colony on Mars. Life outside the Earth's biosphere will require either food supplies from our home planet, or we will have to grow food already on the spot, and since the first option is completely impractical and extremely costly in the long run, we will have to resort to farming on the Red Planet.
If you watched the movie "The Martian", then remember how the main character grew potatoes in a greenhouse using Martian soil, frozen feces of the expedition team, and water obtained during a chemical reaction.
“The reality is much more complicated,” says Ralf Fritzsche, chief project manager for food production at the Space Center. Kennedy (NASA).
NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars by 2030, and SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is proposing an aggressive Mars colonization program based on the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). But even if SpaceX manages to send humans to Mars, they have no plan yet as to how they will grow food there.
To maintain at least one person on Mars will require at least $ 1 billion a year - just for food. Obviously, a different approach is needed here.
"Elon Musk has offered the world a challenge," said Daniel Batcheldor, professor of physics and space sciences at Florida Institute of Technology and director of the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute. “We know that we cannot maintain a colony on Mars with supplies from Earth alone. The colony must become self-sufficient to survive on the Red Planet."
Fritzsche and NASA colleague Trent Smith have teamed up with scientists from the Buzz Aldrin Space Center to figure out how to grow anything on Mars. Biologically, astronauts' waste can be a good help in this matter, but in order to create an analogue of earth's soil, we will need a lot more - from soil detoxification products to artificial bacteria.
"There is no organic matter in the Martian regolith," says Brooke Wheeler of the Florida Aeronautics College of Technology. in their presence, plants can consume the nutrients in the waste."
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Wheeler and her colleague Drew Palmer, assistant professor of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, use soil that mimics Martian soil, hoping they can still figure out a way to grow food on Mars. The analogue of the Martian soil used is volcanic sand from Hawaii, which lacks essential nutrients for plants.
Simulating the Martian regolith is a good start, but Wheeler and Palmer recognize that the simulation is incomplete. One of the main problems that future colonizers will have to face is the toxicity of the Martian soil. Martian regolith is packed to capacity with perchlorate salts, toxic to humans, which are used in production on Earth and can cause serious thyroid disease. Before we can turn Mars into agricultural land, we need a way to rid Martian soil of perchlorates.
"We are extremely interested in creating artificial microorganisms that can cleanse the soil of toxic substances," says Palmer. "This is quite possible, here on Earth."
The researchers also propose sending a robotic mission to Mars several months before the first man sets foot on the planet's surface. Robots will be able to prepare the Martian regolith for use, rid it of toxic substances, and begin to plant plants. The idea is to provide astronauts with a working farm when they arrive on Mars, which will not only provide them with food, but also help maintain life support systems by providing additional oxygen and regulating air toxicity.
In addition to the practical task, the farm on Mars will also perform the function of maintaining the psychological health of the expedition members. Trent Smith, while leading Project Veggie at the International Space Station, which uses hydroponics to supply plants with nutrients in microgravity, saw the relish the astronauts on the ISS enjoyed growing plants in an otherwise lifeless place.
“Since they are on a space station, in, one might say, hostile conditions, with all these cables and wires, with only one metal and plastic around … when they have these little growing leaves and roots that they care about - for them it's like a piece of home, a little piece of nature,”notes Smith. "There on Mars, it will mean a lot."
“If we were planning an expedition for months, hydroponics alone would be enough - it's extremely effective,” says Smith. “But since we want the expedition to stay there for a long time, it makes sense to switch to farming. You can use either method."
In any case, we will have to use all our ingenuity as a species to re-learn agriculture, only this time - in hostile conditions on another planet.
“It’s like we’re going back to the early agrarian society when we were learning how to farm the land,” says Batcheldor. "However, instead of using our planet's fertile soil, we literally have to create new soil on Mars."