Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

NASA ponders ways to grow a garden on Mars mission

Rick Marshall
By

We’ve all tried the packets of freeze-dried “astronaut food” at one point or another, so it’s not surprising to find out that those packets — and even the more modern types of space food — probably won’t be enough to keep space travelers sated and healthy on a multi-year journey. With NASA planning a mission to Mars that could take five years or more to arrive at the Red Planet, the question facing researchers now is: how do we feed them?

According to NASA, one solution might be a vegetable garden or some other type of self-replenishing food supply that would reduce the amount of food that needs to be on the spacecraft at launch.

Recommended Videos

“[The amount of food required to keep astronauts fed] is a clear impediment to a lot of mission scenarios,” said Maya R. Cooper, a senior research scientist in NASA’s Space Food Systems Laboratory, during a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society. “We need new approaches.”

Related

Currently, astronauts require around 3.8 pounds of food per day for missions into space and aboard the International Space Station. That means a five-year mission to Mars and back would need almost 7,000 pounds of food for each astronaut.

A garden aboard the spacecraft could eliminate some of that food burden, though — and it’s one of the potential solutions being explored. Not only would a “kitchen garden” provide healthy food for the astronauts, but it would also serve as an air purifier of sorts, converting the astronauts’ exhaled carbon dioxide to oxygen.

“Right now, we are looking at the possibility of implementing a bioregenerative system that would involve growing crops in space and possibly shipping some bulk commodities to a Mars habitat as well,” explained Cooper. “This scenario involves much more food processing and meal preparation than the current food system developed for the space shuttles and the International Space Station.”

While that’s all well and good, we’re a bit surprised that NASA hasn’t considered another option: Twinkies. Lightweight, invulnerable to decay, and delicious, they could very well be the perfect third option for keeping astronauts fueled on their way to Mars.

So, think about it, NASA: Twinkies. Consider it a freebie from your friends here.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Rick Marshall
Rick Marshall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
See the strange and beautifully layered terrain of Mars’ Juventae Chasma
This image shows plains North of the Southwestern Juventae Chasma, a canyon part of the gigantic Valles Marineris system.

While life is rapidly changing all over the globe right now, the rest of the solar system is going about business as usual. And that includes our planetary neighbor Mars, where NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured a particularly stunning image of the strange ridges and channels formed on the planet's surface by erosion.

This area of Mars is called the Juventae Chasma, a huge canyon that stretches over 150 miles wide and which is named after the mythical fountain of youth. On the floor of the canyon, you'll find sand dunes and a mountain of sulfate deposits which is one and a half miles high. This region has many areas of striking layers, in which different sediments have been deposited on top of one another and eroded to form elaborate patterns that can be seen from orbit.

Read more
Curiosity rover snaps a selfie of Mars’ rocky Greenheugh Pediment
A cropped closeup of the Curiosity rover's selfie.

NASA's Curiosity rover recently conquered its steepest ever slope, making it to the top of an area called the Greenheugh Pediment, a sheet of rock at the top of a hill. This made the perfect opportunity to capture an image of the scene just below the top of the hill, with the rover capturing another fascinating selfie before it took off up the slope.

You can see a massive, high-resolution version of the image here.

Read more
NASA’s Perseverance rover almost ready for its trip to Mars
NASA's Mars 2020 rover, now called Perseverance, undergoes processing at a payload servicing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 14, 2020.

NASA has completed installation and testing of one of the final parts of the Perseverance rover, formerly known as the Mars 2020 rover, which is set to explore the Red Planet following its launch in a few months' time. The rover's Adaptive Caching Assembly and the Bit Carousel were integrated into the rover's body, then their electrical wiring tested. Now, the interior of the rover is essentially complete.

"With the addition of the Adaptive Caching Assembly and Bit Carousel, the heart of our sample collection system is now on board the rover," Matt Wallace, deputy project manager of the Mars 2020 mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "Our final but most crucial elements to install will be the sample tubes that will contain the first samples that will be brought from another planet back to Earth for analysis. We will keep these pristine until we integrate them in a couple of months."

Read more