Tim Huurdeman, Wieger Wamelink, Arni Janssen
How can we grow food sustainably under extreme conditions, such as on the Moon and Mars? In these environments, water, nutrients, energy, and labour are scarce. Designing a system that can effectively and sustainably provide food for humans in these conditions is a major challenge. This unconventional environment, where every drop of water and every gram of nutrients matter, has a great innovative potential: it will not only enable food production in space, but it improve our ability to feed the earth’s rapidly growing population.
Can we support human needs in the harshest environments?
S.P.H.E.R.E. (Sealed Plant Habitat for controlled Environment Research and Experimentation) is a novel research platform designed for advanced experiments to help facilitate these developments.
Conventional plant research is performed in open systems, where plants and soil are exposed to the earth’s atmosphere. This acts as a large buffer, making it difficult to calculate exactly how much CO2, water, and nutrients a plant takes up, or how much oxygen and water vapour it produces. In contrast, S.P.H.E.R.E. contains a fully enclosed and airtight plant growth chamber, inside which the environment is highly controlled and precisely monitored. It can be seen as a ‘plant laboratory’, where each element can be individually controlled and inspected. The goal is to enable exploration into how crops can grow autonomously, efficiently, and circularly. The design is based on a simple principle: everything entering and exiting the system should be controlled, measured. and, wherever possible, reused. The system has been modularly designed to support research with numerous crops, soil substrates, and environmental conditions.
Construction of the SPHERE system
Global food production has a major effect on our planet, in more ways than most of us realise. Efficiency gains of single percentage points can therefore make a significant difference. Working on a system to produce food in space might seem like a strange way to improve agriculture on Earth, but knowledge from earlier space missions has been finding its way into farming practices for decades.
#Mars #Moon #Crop #Spacefarmer