When the best case scenario is being 34 million miles from home, Martian colonists are going to be looking for comfort food, and nothing says comfort like a potato.
NASA joined forces with the International Potato Center to recreate conditions on Mars in order to see if potatoes could be a viable crop on the Red Planet.
Everything happens inside a rocket-launchable box called a CubeSat. The CubeSat is rigged with pumps, water hoses, LED lights, and instruments to emulate Mars-like temperatures, light cycles, gases, and air pressure.
In February, researchers dumped practically lifeless soil from Peru’s Pampas de la Joya Desert inside, planted a tuber in it, sealed the box, and began filming to see what happened.
Preliminary tests were promising, especially for the alternative purpose of addressing food scarcity in the harshest environments on our home planet. The desert soil could still have the benefit of microbes aiding the plants’ growth, so one alternative is to use moon dust, which would likely be even more inhospitable than Martian soil.
Here’s a look at a timelapse of the experiment:
Comments