Feb. 24, 2006
NASA is planning a human habitat on Mars. What will they eat when they get
there?
Robert Cook, professor of computer sciences, is experimenting with Earth plants
that can survive on Mars in his office. His goal is to seed life on the surface
of Mars and to move toward robotic greenhouses that will provide food plants for
future astronauts.
In 2004 and 2005 Cook served as a Faculty Fellow with NASA, which was the
catalyst for starting this project. He wanted to find a way to encourage middle
and high school students to do science or school projects on the Mars mission.
“The trick is that whatever I came up with, it had to be something a middle or
high school student could realistically do safely and maybe with school
equipment and not too expensive,” he explained.
“The Mars atmosphere is cold, low pressure and carbon dioxide is the major
gas,” he said. “But it turns out that plants on Earth like carbon dioxide
and generate oxygen. We do have plants that exist in cold, dry conditions, such
as cacti and lichens, but we don’t necessarily have a duplicate of the type of
atmosphere you’d find on Mars.”
Cook decided to use a vacuum Bell Jar because it is part of almost every high
school’s science equipment. He added carbon dioxide using a bicycle flat tire
kit, then added cactus from Wal-Mart and pumped the atmosphere to a low
pressure. “The missing ingredient is a low temperature,” he said.
“Mars really doesn’t have cloudy days–it has dusty days, but not cloudy
ones,” he said. “There is plenty of sunshine on Mars and the climate is cold
and dry–but they think there is ice underneath the surface.
“We assume that there could be warmer geothermal areas on the surface or that
plants in a portable greenhouse would be warmer,” he explained.
In recent months, Cook has visited a high school and an elementary school on
Hilton Head Island, S.C., where he gave invited talks on the topic. “After
visiting the schools I received responses from teachers saying they were going
to start a Mars garden,” he said.
Cook is excited about the potential this project could have. “As far as we
know at this point, Mars is a lifeless planet and we have the ability to bring
life to it,” he said. “Mars is an entire world that we have the opportunity
to populate if we can figure out what will grow there. That’s pretty
exciting.”
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