Journalist Report: Sol 15: Focus on: Martian Agriculture – How to grow food on Mars?

Author: Pierre Fabre

February 15, 2022

Hi everyone and welcome back! In today’s report we are going to talk about Martian agriculture with Julie for this new episode of “Focus On”! I can’t wait to talk to you about those cool experiments!

But before let’s talk a bit about what happened during this Sol 15 on Mars!

This afternoon, those who hadn’t gone yesterday on the human factors experiment of the University of Lorraine had to do it. As always it was really tiring and they didn’t seem to have appreciated it. I’ve been talking to you a lot (too much maybe?) about the « shapes test » task and how terrible it was to stay focused during 15 minutes straight but today I want to be fair and talk to you about another task of that experiment. The first task is to click on the button as soon as a cross appears on the screen. It is pretty simple and the aim is to measure your reactivity. We have all noticed that we performed better before the mission and that the more tired we were, the worse the performance was. This simple example shows how relevant this experiment can be in our context and we all hope that they will be able to draw interesting conclusions thanks to our data.

To comfort them, Marion made Martian cookies for the crew and they were honestly delicious! We are starting to think about writing an entire recipe book about Martian food rather than giving you the recipes in my reports. I think it would be cool and we will let you know if the book is published one day!

After that, Marion and François took a moment to do a podcast to answer questions we had received from middle school students. Those questions were really interesting and we really thank them for having sent them. Sometimes, they were quite hard to answer and we had to discuss all together to find a satisfying answer. It is always a pleasure to use this mission and the subject of space as a way to inspire and to talk about science to students. This is something we do a lot at the Mars Club of ISAE-SUPAERO in partnership with OSE which is a social association that acts in favour of equality of chances in education. Raphael, the seventh member of the crew who was not able to take off with us, was in charge of the popularisation of science section of the Mars Club and he did an excellent job. He contacted so many teachers and went, with other members of the club, in so many middle and high schools to talk about Mars, Space and Science in general. We are really grateful for all the work he put into sharing his passion and his knowledge with students. I also see our daily reports as an opportunity to try to talk about Space and Science in general in an understandable and entertaining way so that every reader, no matter how young or knowledgeable they are, can hopefully learn something at the end of the day, at least it would make me really happy if it turns out to be the case.

Talking about learning things, it is time to start this new episode of “Focus on: Martian Agriculture”. I hope you will enjoy it! Let’s see what Julie has to say on that subject!

“-Hi Julie! Thanks for taking time to talk about your experiments with us! Can you start by introducing the startup you’ve been in contact with for this experiment?

-Toopi organics is a French start-up that specializes in collecting urine, their treatment and its use as a fertiliser. I contacted this company as I was looking for experiments about ecology and more specifically on the topic of recycling and better use of our resources. During my research, I found them and their work intrigued me. Simply put, urine can be used to enhance the growth of microorganisms. Thus, Toopi Organics developed a solution from urine creating an efficient fertiliser. For me, reusing and recycling our waste is something that makes sense on Earth but even more so for a Mars or space mission where we constantly have to consciously save our resources and think about possibilities to reuse our waste. This is why I wanted to cooperate with Toopi Organics on this topic of urine recycling for agriculture. They proposed two different experiments on this theme and helped us elaborate protocols.

-Ok cool! Let’s start with the first experiment, can you tell us more?

-The first experiment is on the topic of spirulina growth. Spirulina is a micro alga from fresh water, rich in nutrients and particularly proteins. It is also easy to cultivate locally. These last two characteristics make this alga environmentally friendly and its growth is very relevant in the context of a Martian simulation mission: easy and fast to cultivate, rich in proteins and does not take a lot of space. In this experiment, two containers are used where the spirulina is floating in a solution containing sodium bicarbonate, sea salt, iron and some stabilised and filtered urine. In the first container, the urine is diluted by a factor of 100 whereas in the second one, it is diluted by a factor of 140. The goal is to study the impact of urine for the growth of spirulina and see if a higher urine concentration will affect its growth rate. On this experiment, we had a technical problem and it has to be redone. I hope that our colleagues from Crew 263 of Supaero will be able to redo it and get great results.

-Yes, I hope too! And what about the second one?

-The second experiment is also very original. Thanks to different rovers sent on Mars, researchers have been able to reproduce Martian soil. This Martian soil is much less compatible with agriculture. It requires good fertilisers for plants to grow in and this stabilised and filtered urine could be one of them. This second experiment consists in growing soybeans in Martian soil that were previously inoculated with a solution containing the urine fertiliser. Therefore, I prepared two solutions with Toopi Organics products: one control solution as a classic fertiliser and a solution containing urine that will be used as our fertiliser of interest. In the two “control” pots, I planted soybeans inoculated with the control solution in Martian soil. In the two other pots, I planted soybeans with the urine-based fertiliser. It has been around two weeks since the beans were planted and the results are exciting. The soy beans grew in all four pots however the ones containing the urine fertiliser are growing at a faster rate. After six weeks and with the help of Crew 263 of Supaero, we will measure the length of the roots, the length of the sprout and the biomass to have quantitative results. I am already very happy with the beginning of this experiment!

-That’s so cool! Julie, thank you very much for your time, it was great to talk about those really interesting experiments with you!“

That’s it for today’s episode of “Focus on”. I hope you enjoyed it! The last episode of “Focus on” will be on drones so stay tuned not to miss it!

Sol 13: Preparation – How to prepare a Mars mission?

Hi everyone and welcome back! In today’s report, we are going to talk about the preparation for a Martian mission.

I’m not going to talk a lot about what happened during this Sol 13 because:

1. It is Sunday, so it is not a very busy day

2. It is Sunday, so I think I deserve to rest at least this afternoon.

However, I can talk to you a bit about what happened this morning.

Even on Sunday, we still have work to do on Mars. We had to change the battery of the LOAC experiment as every day. This time, Marion and Clément heroically volunteered. They took that opportunity to install two other instruments: PurpleAir and the electric field mill. From the window of the Hab, I watched them doing their job and they did it really well. They managed to successfully install those experiments which was not easy with the gloves and the spacesuits. Now, we will start gathering data for the CNRS thank to them.

After this intense morning, at least for them two, we will finally have the lunch everybody has been waiting for since the beginning of the mission: Martian Burgers. Our Commander has already started to cook the buns and I can’t wait to taste those Martian Burgers. We will make the burger patties with rehydrated beef and add some fresh cherry tomatoes from the GreenHab. Even Gordon Ramsay has never tasted something like that. We hope it won’t become an episode of Kitchen Nightmare but we feel pretty confident.

Now let’s talk about the preparation of this Martian mission.

As some of you may already know, we’ve been preparing this mission for two years now. In fact, it was supposed to be one year, but due to Covid, we weren’t able to take off last year but we managed to delay the mission to this year.

Let’s start by the beginning of this adventure. We were chosen for this mission in December 2019. A jury composed by former crew members and professors from ISAE-SUPAERO, studied our profiles and had us take an interview to determine if we would be part of the crew and for which role.

After the selection, we started the preparation of the mission. There were, in my opinion, three main objectives.

Find sponsors and collect funds to pay for the mission. Indeed, the mission has a cost and we had to collect 20000€ to pay for everything. This part was hard because we had no experience in this domain. But we learned. We sent mails to companies, we called them and sometimes they were ready to come on this adventure with us and financially support us. Here is a list of those who accepted to support us. This list does not include those related to experiments, we will talk about them later.

-CNES is the French Space Agency. We have been working with them for outreach for younger people via the Mars Club.

-Parrot, a French drone manufacturer who also lent us two ANAFI drones which we use for my drone mapping experiment.

-The Student Association of our School which accepted to support the project via the Mars Club.

-The Fondation ISAE-SUPAERO, which is very supportive for student projects.

-Sahut-Conreur, a French company interested by the use of 3D printing for metal working applications

-Acticity, an association that acts for education of young people which is a value we strongly share

-Planète Mars, the French branch of the Mars Society. They help popularise the idea of visiting Mars in the future.

-Société générale is a large French bank partner of the Student Association of our school. They are always interested in students projects.

Find experiments to bring with us on Mars. This is a very important component of the preparation. There is no interest in going on Mars if we don’t have relevant experiments to perform there. So we did our research about experiments that would be interesting for our mission and we contacted companies and labs. It was really interesting to exchange with researchers and create procedures for the mission. Thanks to our work, we have a lot of relevant experiments to talk to you about in our « Focus on » episodes. Some labs have also accepted to financially support us to bring their experiments.

-SacLab, a ISAE-SUPAERO’s lab for which we perform the TELEOP experiment

-CNRS for which we gather data with LOAC, PurpleAir, the electric field mill and soon Mega-ARES.

-The University of Lorraine for which we perform, not without pain, the human factor experiment that includes the terrible « shapes test ».

And last objective, but not least: become a real crew. This includes:

-Get to know each other

-Learn to work together

-Learn to rely on the crew

This is really important when you are planning on going to another planet with 6 other people you don’t know yet. For that purpose, we have been meeting every week for two years. Once again, COVID complicated everything and we had to meet most of the times on Zoom. Despite that, I think we still managed to create a team spirit and I think that now we are all very good friends!

This preparation was like a marathon, you have to stay focused during two years and never lose your motivation. The second year, after the rescheduling, was the worst. It was hard to go back on working on a mission that was already prepared. On top of that, the borders between Europe and the USA were still closed so we were starting to work again towards a mission we still didn’t know if we could do. Yet we persevered, and despite the setbacks we’ve made it all the way there on Mars, and in the end that means all the work was worth it. Sure, we’ve all changed a little after a year of delay, either from our experiences of work and studies, or simply in our outlook of what this mission means to us, but the joy of getting to work on a mission we worked so hard for is still the very same.