Food for Mars

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/11/mars-food-source

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The race is on to colonise Mars with national agencies and private companies setting their sights upon its terrain. But if getting pioneers to the red planet is a mission, feeding them is another.

Now, some students are aiming to investigate the possibility of growing a sustainable food source on Mars. Team “Seed” has won the chance to send a type of cress on board an unmanned mission to the planet.

Launched by the non-profit organisation Mars One, which plans to establish human life on Mars, the competition sought to unearth an innovative payload for a preliminary lander mission, scheduled for take-off in 2018. The winning team – postgraduates from Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands – believe they can be the first to germinate seeds on the red planet. Their plant of choice is a species called Arabidopsis thaliana.

Such seeds have been widely used in research — including in experiments on the International Space Station. “The genes of the plants are very well sequenced and well known in the scientific community,” adds Teresa Araújo, a member of team Seed.

Photo updates will be beamed down from Mars, allowing the researchers to keep an eye on the seeds as they begin to germinate inside their credit card-sized cassettes. Bidding to replicate Earth’s atmospheric conditions, the team will also have control over the temperature, pressure, and oxygen concentrations that the seeds are exposed to.With the first prototype of their project expected within the year, Araújo believes the team’s experiments will prove valuable in understanding how to grow plants on the red planet and that, she says, will offer more than mere sustenance. “It will be a great life supporter because they produce food and also oxygen,” she says. “It is really important to achieve the possibility of giving oxygen to people who will live on Mars.”