Features
Mars ‘Kitchen Garden' Being Tested on Campus
Keeping Mars pioneers fed and watered may rely on ‘Centre Six for space' developed at Guelph
BY ANDREW VOWLES
If it's true that an army marches on its stomach, so will a mission to Mars. Anyone making that pioneering interplanetary trip — sometime mid-century, predicts environmental biology professor Mike Dixon — will probably wonder about a basic question: Where's my next meal coming from?
Part of the answer may rest inside a new state-of-the-art growth chamber being built and tested this fall at U of G for life-support scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA). That big blue box on legs in the Bovey Building will be used in Europe to test and perfect plant growth techniques for keeping those long-distance voyagers fed and watered.
Using technology developed by Dixon and his associates here at Guelph, the sealed climate-controlled chamber provides lighting, water, nutrients and other components needed to grow food from scratch. Pop seedlings for tomatoes, beets or wheat into growth trays at one end of the chamber, place the trays onto an internal conveyor system and then wait for the prescribed weeks or months for ripe produce to roll out at the other end. Call it the Mars kitchen garden — or a Centre Six for space, quips research associate and project manager Geoffrey Waters.
The system is intended to produce a continuous harvest to sustain a space crew, based on food and nutrient requirements worked out several years ago with Cornell University. Says Waters: “You can get a Centre Six salad buffet from this every day.”
For a Mars journey or for any long-term stay at a proposed moon base, the food production system is going to be the mainstay of life support, says Dixon. “This particular chamber is the next incremental step.”
About half as long as a truck trailer and as high and wide as an adult's outstretched arms, the new chamber was designed by U of G scientists and built this year by Angstrom Engineering in Cambridge. It looks like a grownup version of the 24 sealed chambers that occupy Guelph's Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility (CESRF) nearby. During the past 12 years, Guelph scientists have studied plant physiology, environmental analysis and sensor technology under the Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture Program.
“We're the current leaders in the world in biological life-support systems, especially food production and atmospheric revitalization,” says Dixon, adding that Guelph is the leading North American institution in this field. (He recently spoke about life-support systems at a congress of the Association of Space Explorers marking the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik satellite launch.)
That's why the ESA has contracted U of G to design and assemble its new-generation plant growth chamber. This fall, Waters has overseen a team working on the chamber's innards and control systems, including electronics, hydroponics, gas exchange, sensors, lighting and logistics. Following a planned visit by ESA officials this fall, the group will test the system by putting through a 30-day crop of lettuce — quick and easy to grow, says Waters.
Then the equipment will be disassembled and shipped to Spain, where he will direct its installation and train users in a pilot facility in Barcelona. That's where the ESA is developing its life-support system test facility, called the MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life-Support System Alternative) project.
Run by the ESA along with several European universities and U of G, MELiSSA is intended to help perfect a closed-loop ecosystem. Like a self-contained world, that system will use plants and microbes to make food, purify water, provide oxygen, clean the air and process waste. (Unlike the stand-alone chambers in the CESRF, this new equipment is intended to mesh with waste-processing technology being developed by Guelph's European partners for the pilot facility in Spain.)
Waters says that kind of information will also be useful here on Earth in everything from designing better greenhouses to helping understand how nature's own recycling system works. “What we're designing is artificial ecosystems.”
For space applications, he says the system will also help researchers learn more about plant nutrient yields, including how much carbohydrate, fat and protein might be continuously produced by the system. Using the original growth chambers in the CESRF, Guelph scientists have done some of that work on six test crops. But the MELiSSA project needs more information about a total of 25 crops chosen as candidates for space. “We need good baseline data for all crops,” says Waters.
Among the questions to be answered using the research chamber: How large should the system be? How much plant production is needed? How many people might the system support, not just with food but also with oxygen? And, not incidentally for a Mars round trip lasting about 30 months, will the food taste any good?
The new low-pressure chamber can hold 20 growth trays at a time, allowing users to stage planting for a continuous supply of food every few days. The existing equipment in the CESRF nurtures only one crop batch at a time.
Waters expects the equipment will be running in Barcelona next year. Under the ESA contract, Guelph will provide two more chambers there. Similar equipment is also destined for Belgium and perhaps Italy.
“This is the standard for all higher plant-related activity in MELiSSA,” he says, adding that the equipment is part of the foundation for a hoped-for Mars voyage in 20 to 50 years. “We can't go to Mars or the moon for the long term without bringing a piece of Earth along with us.”