{{Is there life on Mars? Nasa has spent decades trying to figure out the answer to David Bowie’s question but a new plan suggests that they are now taking matters into their own hands with the Mars Plant Experiment.}}
The proposal, unveiled at the recent Humans 2 Mars conference in Washington, is to send seeds to the red planet and establish a tiny Martian greenhouse – no bigger than a football – by 2021.
If successful, the greenhouse will pave way for naturally grown food for future humans on Mars, including Nasa’s own planned manned mission sometime in the 2030s.
{{International effort}}
At the moment, long-term survival in space is a costly affair, with astronauts aboard the International Space Station eating prepackaged food that costs nearly £14,000 ($23,000) per kilogram to send up to space.
The idea of Nasa’s Ames Research team, led by scientist Chris McKay, the Mars Plant Experiment would cut Nasa’s costs dramatically; with the first astronauts on Mars requiring expertise in farming as well as space exploration.
Speaking to the Human 2 Space conference, the experiment’s deputy principal investigator Heather Smith explained that “In order to do a long-term, sustainable base on Mars, you would want to be able to establish that plants can at least grow on Mars.
This would be the first step in that…we just send the seeds there and watch them grow.”
Growing interest
If approved, the experiment will be carried out via Nasa’s $1.5 billion-costing 2020 Rover mission, which, along with the experiment, will also be looking for signs of past life and collecting samples of rocks for possible future return to Earth.
The seeds will be carried in a CubeSat box – a case used for smaller and cheaper satellites — which would be attached to the outer body of a new design of Rover which is heavily based on the current Curiosity model: the rover which landed in on Mars in August 2012 and confirmed that it had once, billions of years ago in a site called Yellowknife Bay, been capable of supporting microbial life.
The box would hold Earth air and about 200 seeds of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant that is widely used as a model organism in plant biology due to changes in thale cress being easily observed.
Once the Rover touches down, however, it will not be planting the seeds in Mars’ dirt, but rather keeping the experiment self-contained and adding water to the box. This is to eliminate the chances that Earth life, especially microbes, could prosper on Mars before humans do.
There are two reasons for this. 1) If that did happen, the result would be disastrous for scientists trying to determine what life is from Earth and what is from Mars, and 2) project leader Chris McKay is known within the scientific community as holding a biocentric position towards the ethics of terraforming, arguing that indigenous Mars life – if it exists – should be given a chance to prosper before being overwhelmed by Earth’s microbes.
{{Green shoots}}
Some 15 days after being watered, the scientists expect to have a small greenhouse with signs of life. If so, then how the martian garden copes with Mars’ environment will be extremely useful for Earth’s future relationship with the planet.
Compared to Earth, the environmental conditions on Mars are extreme with a non-breathable thin, low pressure carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, extremely strong radiation from the sun, temperatures on average of -63 °C and just 38 per cent of the gravity that exists on Earth.
It has been said before, though, that plants will find it difficult to survive due to Mars’ low air pressure.
Molecular biologist Rob Ferl, director of Space Agriculture Biotechnology Research and Education at the University of Florida, has been experimenting for years on how plants will react on the moon or Mars, and has said that, “plants have no evolutionary preadaption to hypobaria.”
According to Ferl, such extreme low pressure will make plants misinterpret biometric signals and act as if they’re drying out. Nasa claim, however, that after years of extensive testing, it doesn’t expect zero-gravity conditions to affect the growth of the plants.
{{Going ahead?}}
Either way, no one will know how successful the experiment will be if it isn’t approved. After all, there’s only so much space for so many instruments on the next Mars rover and, at present, Nasa are considering proposals for a total of 58 different instruments with only ten spare places available. It would be a shame not to try, though – especially given the overall objective.
“We would go from this simple experiment to the greenhouses on Mars for a sustainable base,’ Heather Smith explained, “That would be the goal. It also would be the first multicellular organism to grow, live and die on another planet.”
