NASA has concluded plans to start farming in Mars as it concluded plan for its first manned mission to Mars in the mid-2030s.

According to Bruce Bugbee, a botanist at Utah State University "The round trip to Mars generally takes about four-and-a-half years if you add in six months on the surface,” “Theoretically, it’s possible to bring four years’ worth of bag lunches, but that would be super expensive.”

It’s also risky to rely on a lightweight resupply rocket, because it can take up to 210 days to arrive. “To be efficient, inhabitants need to eat local, which means we need to find a way to produce food on Mars from recycled wastes,” he explains. “If we can’t, we are not going to be able to live on the Red Planet.”


Bugbee is working with NASA to develop closed systems for growing plants aboard space shuttles and on the International Space Station for the past 30 years.
Today, there are small, engineered space greenhouses that can grow nutritious plants by rigorously controlling the plant environment.

“Taking this to scale to support humans is going to be the real challenge,” says Robert Heinse, a soil scientist at the University of Idaho. “Some of these challenges are simply a question of where to get enough water and nutrients. Other challenges are unique to the space environment like cosmic radiation, lack of atmosphere, and low levels of light.”

To create the technology necessary to make longer space missions possible, NASA is working with Utah State, along with three other universities, to be a part of CUBES (Center for Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space).

The initiative, a $15 million, five-year project funded by NASA, will be led by Adam Arkin, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Utah State University, the University of California at Davis, Stanford University, Autodesk, and Physical Sciences Inc. will be partner organizations.

Earth’s soil is a mixture of minerals, organic matter, gases, liquids, and countless organisms. The Red Planet is covered with crushed volcanic rock containing nothing living. Mars does, however, have carbon dioxide, some nitrogen in the atmosphere, and frozen water. As a first step, Bugbee’s colleague and biochemist Lance Seefeldt will study ways to convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia using bacteria and solar energy.

“We will also look at inoculating plants with rhizobia like we do legumes to help them fix nitrogen,” says Bugbee.

Rhizobia is one of the groups of soil bacteria that infect the roots of legumes to form root nodules. After infection, it produces nodules on the roots where they fix nitrogen gas from the atmosphere and produce a more readily useful form of nitrogen.

In order to achieve this, light is needed. Although it is more dispersed on Mars than on Earth, some light is available.

“Mars has only 60% of our light intensity at the surface, which means reduced photosynthesis,” explains Bugbee. “There is still enough light to grow crops.”

One crop that shows great promise is soybeans. “Soybeans are an important crop for Mars because of the diversity of products that can be made from them,” says Bugbee.

Source:http://theprofarmer.com/nasa-to-start-space-farming-in-mars/