Eps 1: potatoes in space
Using NASA technology and a Chinese technique for growing seed potatoes, Quantum Tubers are a Space Age answer to growing more and better potatoes worldwide.
To understand how the process works, it's important to know how the potatoes destined for your order of fries first begin.
The seed potatoes can be grown year-round in extreme environmental settings, such as deserts or excessively cold regions.
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Five small potatoes are grown in orbit from tubers in the plant breeding of astroculture. The potatoes do not need much to survive, and the team hopes that quantum tubers will be useful for growing more and better potatoes worldwide, as they are used to grow seeds for the potatoes. In this space experiment, a plant potato is grown in a tuber on the ISS in the "Quantum Tuber" system of the space shuttle Columbia.
A month after launch, the Hamlin Park experiment has already generated national interest. It was presented locally in the Buffalo News and the WBFO, and the spuds used are bred from a disease-resistant breed that was obtained by researchers at Cornell University led by Cornell Professor of Botany and Plant Biology, Dr. John D. Schmitt, who is also advising the project.
Before NASA can send astronauts to Mars, it must figure out how to feed them there. Cornwell, Melendez and Welch traveled to NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where they got the chance to talk to the astronauts on Skype and ask them if they could imagine growing potatoes on Mars.
The US space agency has teamed up with a research group in Peru that focuses exclusively on spud research to work on developing a crop for use on Mars and other planets in the solar system.
The International Potato Centre, as it is called, is dedicated to understanding how the tubers of the potato can be cultivated and eventually fed. Last week, CIP announced that this year it was able to grow potatoes on a plot of land modeled after the harsh environment of Mars. Today, colonists on Mars could use the planet's dirt to grow potatoes and more.
The success is part of a process that will eventually lead to food being grown there and astronauts growing it there, says Dr. Michael O'Brien, director of the International Potato Center. The challenge for the space station is to extract water and oxygen to allow plants to grow in microgravity, where there are ups and downs.
Maybe they want to use urine instead of feces to produce more urine, "Wheeler says," but that's a bit long.
CIP, NASA and other institutions are now watching how several varieties of potatoes evolve on Mars - such as the CubeSat box, including special varieties bred to withstand the harsh conditions. In 2015, the US Department of Agriculture's Office of Science and Technology Policy told Tech Insider that there was no reason why growing potatoes or other food crops in the Martian soil would not work. However, several other experiments have shown that it may be possible to grow food in even more inhospitable lunar dust, known as regolith.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have been trying out their crops with the Veggie plant growth system, which tests the feasibility of growing vegetables and other plants in space. The work will not only help astronauts and farmers of the future, but will also benefit people on Earth. By comparing conditions on Mars, where water irrigation is normally used to grow crops, NASA is also exploring precise irrigation methods to help astronauts optimize crop harvesting in the future.
The potatoes are grown on the International Space Station and placed in tubes like this one, and the space agency is funding research to investigate the link between water content and leaf stiffness and examine data that could be monitored by sensors. Berry does research on plants that he has to grow in a sterile environment without soil, so he was an ideal consultant for the potato project in space. He not only studied how plants react to gravity, but also how plants react to atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity and other factors.
Wheeler and his colleagues, including plant scientists, are studying ways to grow safe, fresh food crops on Earth efficiently. In consultation with Professor Franz, the students followed a construction in which tubers were cultivated in tubes.
Most recently, astronauts have harvested and eaten romaine lettuce on the International Space Station, which they have activated and grown using a plant growth system called Veggie. Wheeler, who has worked at Kennedy since 1988, was a member of the plant scientists who helped get the "veggie" unit tested and certified for use aboard the space station. The facility chamber developed by Orbitec has passed a safety review and met all requirements of NASA's Space Food Safety and Environmental Protection Agency (SFPA).
NASA has been observing manned missions to the Red Planet for decades, and Congress has just passed legislation calling on the space agency to reach the planet by 2033. To this end, NASA's Mars Exploration Program (MEP) and the Space Launch System (SLS) are building nodules - growing experiments to replicate the extreme conditions on the Martian surface. The CubeSat will become a cutting-edge model of space technology, mimicking the conditions of gravity in the Red Planet's atmosphere - high altitude, low gravity.