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NASA Is Trying to Grow Potatoes on Mars
- cwkoss 11y agoSounds like someone at NASA read The Martian...
- ortusdux 11y agoProbably someone in the marketing dept.
- jessaustin 11y agoI would expect NASA to be more concerned with "public relations" than "marketing". I know, "potato, potAHto"...
- Retra 11y agoPeople at NASA helped write The Martian.
- 0xffff2 11y agoYeah, most of NASA probably. Andy Weir gave a talk at NASA Ames last summer and it was crowded to say the least.
- xfactor973 11y agoI hope they're planning on taking TPS or true potato seeds with them. You could fit a million true potato seeds in a small pouch and you'd be set for a long time :)
- SCAQTony 11y agoI suspect Monsanto will "have to Science the shit" into these potatoes and create new GMO strains to fight the cold, the radiation and low water availability. I would rather have another James Webb telescope or send a few hundred probes to Alpha Centauri with the money it will cost to go to Mars.
- manicdee 11y agoIcelanders manage to grow decent crops in greenhouses. There is no reason to suggest that Martians should operate any differently.
- ortusdux 11y agoI wonder if this would be a good application for one of these tomato-potato grafted plants. http://www.territorialseed.com/product/grafted-tomtato-ketchup-n-fries http://www.territorialseed.com/product/grafted-tomtato-ketch...
- stcredzero 11y agoOne of the meaningful bits of engineering one can do on Earth for furthering Martian agriculture, is the recycling of water. It's going to cost energy and worker-time to extract water out of the soil. Even machinery that condenses water out of the Martian air will require energy and maintenance. (Possibly passive structures that condense water?) For this reason, we may want to research habitats that can almost completely retain moisture in the form of water vapor and extract it out of the air. Such requirements are quite uncommon for structures on Earth, doubly so if you also add in the requirements of enclosing useful agricultural acreage and pressurization. Submarines are probably good at doing this, but the price per square meter of floor would be prohibitive. We'd want to be able to build such structures on Mars from in-situ resources. Building such structures on Earth and growing crops like potatoes within them would constitute worthwhile research in preparation of colonizing Mars. (One side effect of such research might be the ability to settle and develop land in places like West Texas, much of which gets very little rain and has land that sells at single-digit dollar prices.)
- ryanhuff 11y agoIf you haven't yet, listen to one of the recent episodes of Star Talk Radio (Season 7, Episodes 4). They have Any Weir, author of "The Martian", and Dr. Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. Dr. Green describes how they now think extracting water from the Martian soil may be as simple as heating up soil. Supposedly, the Martian soil contains roughly 35 liters of water for every cubic meter of soil.
- stcredzero 11y agoI was thinking precisely about this technique. That's still going to take labor and energy to accomplish, both of which are scarce.
- SEJeff 11y agoLabor from machines and energy from the Sun. Seems imminently doable with the tech of today.
- a3n 11y ago> As humans prepare to blast off to Mars, there is still the question of what they’ll eat once they colonize the red planet. Scientists who have traveled here to the Peruvian desert say they have the answer. Potatoes. Followed by the Great Martian Potato Famine, and then signs in the windows of Earth businesses stating "No Martians."
- fucking_tragedy 11y agoMartians Need Not Apply
- awqrre 11y agoThey should have done corn for the high-fructose corn syrup ... because apparently we need it in everything.
- known 11y agoLeave Mars alone;
- vinchuco 11y agoIt would be ironic if something were to happen to us and potatoes became the life form that colonized space.
- yincrash 11y agoAn interesting piece of trivia, while potatoes are in cuisine across the world now, they are native to the Americas (which is briefly mentioned in the article). It's ability to feed many (being caloricly dense), as well as being fairly rugged allowed it to create Europe's population boom and urbanization when it was introduced there. Let's hope the same can be done to Mars!
- ekianjo 11y ago> It's ability to feed many (being caloricly dense), as well as being fairly rugged allowed it to create Europe's population boom and urbanization when it was introduced there But don't forget to mention that Potato issues have caused massive immigration from Ireland in History (resulting in a large influx of Irish folks to North America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- prawn 11y agoWhereas some things are fairly straightforward to grow from their own last-crop seeds, resowing potatoes from some you already have often results in disease. I grow a lot of different things in my backyard. From one lettuce, coriander, radish, pumpkin or tomato plant, I can collect loads and loads of seeds to regrow. In the case of a lettuce plant, it's thousands of seeds. Potatoes are trivial to grow from old shrivelled supermarket stock (and sometimes scraps with the eyes intact) but 80+% of crops I've grown this way have been riddled internally with disease. Pictures here: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=potato+disease&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=potato+disease&source=lnm...
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoSeed potatoes are so inexpensive, it's not worth using old potatoes (though I have done that many times). I don't know where you live, but around here supermarkets will soon be selling 5lb bags of seed potatoes at comically low prices. It is ridiculously cheap to grow some staples: I can buy 100 onion sets for $2.00/bag at my local "pricy" feed store. Enough corn to plant an acre costs about $5, etc...
- SCAQTony 11y ago"... If they grow successfully, the potatoes will then be planted in a simulator that factors in the atmospheric conditions on Mars. ..." Will it also simulate the cosmic rays Mars has to endure and can these rays be duplicated?
- siculars 11y agoMay I bathe in these rays and become and X-Man or Fantastic Fifth?
- smallhands 11y agono ,you will dead .it is that simple
- Luyt 11y agoThe rays are ionizing and will smash apart the DNA molecules in living cells.
- lmm 11y agoIt won't be an exact duplicate, but we know what the radiation flux is, there's no reason we couldn't subject them to the same overall level of radiation.
- kobayashi 11y ago>Mars One, a Dutch nonprofit foundation, plans to send individuals to the planet in about 10 years on a one-way trip to establish a permanent colony. Come on. A journalist from a serious publication is still talking about Mars One as anything other than a large scam? Ridiculous.
- chrisdotcode 11y agoWhy do you think that Mars One is a scam? Is it not feasible to get humans to Mars in ~10 years?
- logfromblammo 11y agoIt has been technically feasible to get humans to Mars for decades already. It has only recently become economically feasible. And we likely have a few more years to go before it becomes politically feasible. The sticking point has never been the tech. It has always been the people. And in my opinion, Mars One does not have the right people to produce a successful mission.
- fiftyacorn 11y agoI'll kick off the study to produce vodka on Mars and we'll be sorted for colonisation of Mars
- type0 11y agoThat's also a good way to get russians onboard
- verytrivial 11y agoTo recreate the surface air pressure of Mars, this experiment should be taking place at an altitude roughly five times the height of Everest or a similarly evacuated chamber. Mars is harsh. (Edit: i.e. yes, all agriculture will likely need to take place under the sort of structures you see on the cover of sci-fi novels from 60s and 70s).
- optforfon 11y agolikely!? water can't even be in a liquid state at that pressure.(which is why I think the whole "water on Mars" stuff is bogus) You'd have a better chance growing potatoes in a middle of a Siberian winter
- Luyt 11y agoIndeed. They mention the composition of the atmosphere, but the low pressure is conveniently forgotten about. The Mars atmosphere is like a vacuum: 0.00628 atm. Earth atmosphere normal pressure is 1 atm. Essentially, being on the surface of Mars is being in space. And what about the radiation? Mars has no magnetic field like Earth has. So the Solar Wind has free play on the surface.
- optforfon 11y agoWhich makes living on the Moon suddenly not look so bad!
- NoGravitas 11y agoJust finished reading _Red Mars_ and am now reading _Green Mars_, so this is relevant to my interests.
- sslayer 11y agoDidn't Mark Wahlberg already do this?