Gadgetory

when we send people to deep space we can't carry a ton of stuff with us there's only so much room on a rocket right and food takes up a lot of space and I can break down over time but one thing we can send with us are super lightweight seeds to grow plants that's why we're here at Kennedy Space Center to learn how to grow yummy food in space and on other planets in order to grow plants you need soil right well there are some problems with that technically on the Moon and Mars it's not really a soil a soil by definition has organic material in it the surface of the Moon and Mars doesn't so they're really regulus it's crushed volcanic rock for the most part and there's components in that chemicals in that that are not conducive to plant growth so especially when we go to Mars we're gonna have to figure out if we want to use the Martian regolith as a medium to grow plants and we're gonna have to convert that regolith into a soil a usable soil right and aren't there some problems yeah already associated with using it soil isn't it a little bit toxic yeah perchlorates they're in the Martian soils are a real problem for plant growth perchlorates are a type of salt NASA's Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover both found signatures of the chemical on Mars and that's not great news high levels of perchloric are toxic to humans which could make growing food on the Red Planet problematic but NASA's thinking of ways to clean the perchlorates by washing them away with chemical solutions there's perchlorates in the environment on earth and their scientists have already developed methods for remediating those perchlorates using microbes theoretically we could go up there and use either chemical or microbial solutions to mitigate the microbes so at the end of the day it might just be better not to use soil at all than to actually try and clean the potentially toxic Mora soil of course you can always bring the soil from Earth but that's not really a great option either because it weighs so much NASA is looking into other options for growing plants that don't use soil we have you know a basic soil here but picking it up that's pretty Hevy and this is even a very big box well even today in control environment agriculture they're getting away from using soil as a medium to grow plants and they want to go to things that are basically hydroponically grown aeroponically grown you want to minimize the resources even today on the ground to grow things in so we're going to be looking at using some of that type of technology and spaceflight so we can eliminate the medium of soil NASA is testing hydroponics a method for growing that has gained popularity among terrestrial farmers in the past few years and also aeroponics as gravity or lack thereof presents its own challenges so we're growing things in kind of a modified hydroponics way right now so hydroponics is growing plants without soil and generally on earth this is using a nutrient solution a liquid solution of nutrients and sometimes you use a substrate like a baked clay or a gravel or a sand sometimes you can just use water and nutrient solution and so we're testing different ways of doing this both for a surface system like Mars where you have some gravity and for microgravity in space so without gravity you get some really interesting challenges you get very different behavior of fluids so water and air have been our biggest challenges especially in the root zone watering your plants and when we figure that out that's going to be huge hydroponics delivers water and nutrients to plant roots using a liquid solution and aeroponics takes it one step further instead of using a solution plants are grown in a misty air environment aside from hydroponics researchers are also testing what environments plants will thrive in best by testing different lights and temperatures including environments similar to that of the ISS our main goal right now is to produce safe nutritious and appealing food for the crew to supplement a packaged diet so they have a really good package diet they have several hundred foods and and they're actually really tasty they do a lot of evaluation to make sure that they're going to be very very delicious for the crew when we go to ours we need a diet that's going to be good for five years and some of the vitamins don't last that long in the packaged food so we're looking at can we use supplemental food production crops plants to add more flavor more texture and more nutrients to that diet I couldn't leave without getting a taste of these plants time to eat basically we're just gonna cut the leaves off and put them in these little pots here so that's all we have to do actually these are microgreens so we're gonna try here a little bit of broccoli with a cauliflower so microgreens actually started life as garnishes and high-end restaurants you'll go into a restaurant would be like a little marigold micro green on there right now it's the meal it's a meal that's the accent for foods the biggest benefit of microgreens is that they can be harvested in a very short amount of time so you don't have to wait weeks or months before you can eat them here is our famous steak plant amara mustard is what it's called it's also known as Ethiopian kale medium rare that weirdly does taste like steak it's got that it's got that you know it takes a while to kick in yeah figuring out how to grow fresh food in space is not only important for the nutritional value it will provide but the psychological value it has as well when you're on Mars you're not gonna be looking down on Earth so I think the plants are gonna be really important for those reasons yeah like having a little taste of home almost exactly while humans have explored and adapted to new environments many times before with space we won't be able to rely on the resources we are accustomed to here on earth growing food is going to be incredibly difficult and we'll have to figure out how to be self-sufficient in entirely new ways because this is an entirely new frontier hey everyone thanks so much for watching our video if you want more science content like this be sure to check out our Virg science YouTube channel I'll see you there