Project

AgriThrive: Emergency preparedness for Plant Growth in Martian/Lunar environments

Maggie Coblentz

Groups

Somayajulu Dhulipala, Manwei Chan, Carlos Portela, MIT SEDS

Overview

As humanity inches closer to setting up colonies on the Moon and Mars, locally grown food will be a big part of making this process sustainable. One risk that plants face in such harsh climates is the possibility of hull breach (i.e. system failure) leading to instantaneous death of the plants due to low temperature, pressure, and exposure to radiation. In this project, we developed an emergency preparedness system for plants in space. Such a system would also find application for growing plants on Earth in low-resource harsh environments such as deserts and polar regions.

In this project we developed and tested out a plant habitat with active temperature and radiation controls in the arctic. The plant habitat has a multilayered structure with air gaps and water that helps control the insulation and radiation shielding of the system. The plant habitat had temperature and light sensors on the inside that collected data necessary for determining survivability of plants. We then subjected the plant habitat to the outside temperatures in varying light conditions ranging from moderate light conditions to low light conditions during the civil twilight and nautical twilight (when the sun is close to the horizon and at a low elevation angle), which mimic the solar environment at the lunar/Martian poles. This helped us chart the spectrum of power management (from moderate light conditions to low-light conditions). The overall system measures 80cm x 80 cm x 40 cm in dimensions and 12.5 kgs in weight. Sensors (temperature sensors, and light intensity sensors) measured conditions (temperature, and light intensity) inside and outside the habitat to test out the survivability of plants in the active system we designed to keep plants safe in case of a hull breach. The figure below shows how AgriThrive is able to extend the amount of time the system stays in safe temperature range by almost 5x in moderate light conditions.

Our system also tested out power-saving modes during plant growth in harsh conditions such as the Arctic. The input radiation varied substantially based on whether the habitat was exposed to the sun or not. Given the different energy characteristics of the two situations, we needed active controls to optimize conditions inside the plant habitat for maximum survivability. In that sense, this research would be beneficial to understanding how we can prioritize power distribution to the plant habitat in case of emergencies. Additionally, this research ties into our broader scheme of replicating the experience of gardening in space with added robustness in case of emergencies. Further, we are currently working on extending this research to develop miniature greenhouses with semi-automatic power management to work in arid conditions (extremely hot during the day and extremely cold during the night). These will also be able to protect plants during inclement weather (such as blizzards and heatwaves) until either the farmer recovers them or the weather system itself passes (most weather systems last only 1-2 days which is about the time period that these systems are being designed for). The video here below shows a typical extraction being done in the Arctic.