RESEARCH TOPICS

Food Production

Research on producing food in outer space has increased in the past decade. Resources in space, like oxygen and water, are precious. Hence, lunar bases must find ways to provide these resources to elongate the astronauts‘ stay. The idea of transporting enough food for a long mission is not possible. Growing food is more reasonable other than transporting it. Planting on the moon provides a multilevel of benefits.

Veggie System

The vegetable production system, known as veggie, is a space garden residing on the space station. Veggie’s purpose is to help NASA study plant growth in microgravity, while adding fresh food to the astronauts’ diet and enhancing happiness and well-being on the orbiting laboratory.

WHY THE VEGGIE SYSTEM?

The veggie system is a light-weight system with a promising future. It requires minimal maintenance and uses simple technology. It is also able to grow flowers, unlike other technologies.

WHICH CROPS GROW IN VEGGIE?

• Red romaine lettuce

• ‘Tokyo bekana’ chinese cabbage

• Mizuna mustard

• Outredgeous red romaine lettuce

• ‘Waldmann’s green’ lettuce

• ‘Red russian’ kale and ‘dragoon’ lettuce

• ‘Wasabi’ mustard and ‘extra dwarf’ pak choi

• Mizuna mustard

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The veggie system consists of a LED lighting system with modular rooting “pillows” designed to contain substrated media and time-release fertilizer. The pillows are watered manually by the astronauts in low earth orbit (LEO). The design of Veggie allows cabin air to be drawn through the plant enclosure for thermal and humidity control and for supplying CO2 to the plants.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE VEGGIE SYSTEM?

The Kennedy Space Center team envisions planting more productive in the future, such as tomatoes and peppers. Foods like berries, certain beans and other antioxidantrich foods would likely have the added benefit of providing some space radiation protection for crew members.

Water Resources

Apart from being a marker of potential life, water is a precious resource. On the moon, water is necessary not only to sustain life but also for many other purposes such as generating rocket fuel. If space explorers can use the moon’s resources, it means they need to carry less water from Earth.

There are a few methods available to extract water from regolith. For example:

- Based on phase change: pumping energy into the regolith to sublimate the ice into vapor, then capturing the vapor, re-freezing it, and hauling the solid ice to a chemical processor where it is converted again into vapor for purification then electrolysis.

- Based on strip mining: hauling the resource along with slag (the unwanted silicates, which constitutes about 95% of the mass), to a processing unit spacecraft launch separation of the solid rocket detachment of the lunar lander from the rocket arriving of the lander on moon‘s surface unloading of the airlock and autonomous robots inflating the digging the holes

- An Ultra-low-energy grain-sorting process can extract the ice without phase change. The ice can then be hauled to the chemical processing unit in solid phase and converted into water or rocket propellant.