Ares

Fasten Your Seats Belts: Seeds Are Going To Mars

High-Level Project Summary

Our system provides a faster, more productive way to grow plants in space. It makes it easy to grow more plants with using less nutrients and water. Also, it isn't necessary to use pesticide because our system decreases the chance of infection spreading. It has appliances which allows it to spray water onto the roots. This helps plants to get more water, vitamins and minerals. We can grow more plants compared to other systems. It has an artificial light source and layers to prevent radiation. Also a sound source to get the help of sound waves in growing plants.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iEMzZaa_ji8wfQbVXhsbS2Bp7uB4zQAa/view?usp=drivesdk

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AoOn_ylOQYAPzVK1tqK49duCdQ3ke_cn/view?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

What Is Our Challenge’s Goal?

Humanity has always been looking at the sky. Wondering what might that endless land of surprises keeps for us. Lately we are trying to reach something bigger, more impressive: Mars. It has been getting discussed for a long time now whether there is a life outside of our planet Earth or not. Since current sources do not seem to be enough for us in the future, we are trying to find some alternative ways. Colonizing on Mars is one of them. But we have a problem here. There is not a suitable system that can provide fresh food for a crew for two or three years.

What Is Our Solution?

We designed a system for a crew that involves 5 people. It includes the way to the Mars. Also, we predict that it will be available to use when they land in Mars by providing water from the ice-fields on the polar of the Mars.

Our system has a lot of benefits. One of them is that we can grow more plants with less nutrients and water compared to other soilless agriculture systems. The water fog spray method works with timer. It sprays water for 2-3 seconds every 3 minutes. This way plant can absorb vitamins and minerals easier. That is one of the factors that helps us save water. And we can keep water cycle by getting water back in the tanks using pipes.

Mass and capacity are critical for a space vehicle. Our system makes it possible to grow more plants using same amount of space compared to other systems. With saving nutrients, we can carry less materiel. Our model has their own sterile place to work on the spaceship. Thanks to its self-embedded structure, it does not take up much space and can be conveniently used for different purposes around it. This work, which does not cause any reduction in the comfort of the crew, will also greatly reduce the amount of packaged food on the spaceship. Besides that, our design decreases the fertilizer usage by sixty percent.

It is really important to keep temperature stable. We use well-known layers called MMK (metal matrix composites) to supply thermal insulation. The layer will both maintain our environment’s temperature still and protect our plants from the radiation. We learned that surfaces that is being painted with tea extract reduces radiation. Thus, we will paint our layers with tea extract.

Since it is important to keep our greenhouse area sterilized and self-sufficient there won’t be a direct entrance or linking between space vehicle and our system. It will be like clean-rooms in labs. It will be necessary to wear a simple clothing to get into the room. There will be a little window to ensure an area for crew to examine the growth of the plants.

Thanks to our sterilized system we don’t need to use any pesticide. Additionally, the space between the roots of the plants provides protection from plant diseases and the infections.

There is an important feature of our design. We attached a sound source. We read about the effects of sound waves on the plants. Emerging studies on plant acoustics have shown that sound waves can regulate the growth, phytochemical contents, and therefore have the potential to enhance the quality of plant products. It suggested that sound waves at 0.1–1 kHz and SPL of (70±5) dB for 3 h from plant acoustic frequency technology generator every other day significantly increased the yield of sweet pepper, cucumber and tomato by 30.05, 37.1 and 13.2%, respectively. Sound waves may also strengthen plant immune systems. So, we decided to add sound waves to our system in addition to get more efficiency.

We can grow a variety of plants. Such as tomatoes, peas, cucumbers etc. Another positive side of our system is it has twice more variety than hydroponics system. It means we have twice more chance to make astronauts feel at home.

Researches had pointed out that our system can maintain plant’s nutritive value more than hydroponic system can. For example, nitrogen value is %2.13 percent in the hydroponics while it’s %3.29 in aeroponics; potassium is %1.81 percent in the hydroponics, %2,46 in aeroponics.

We also can use this system on Earth. For example, it is possible to use this system in the poles by getting water from glaciers. It would help the polar researchers to get fresh food too.

How to Improve Our Design in the Future?

In other projects our system can be improved adding more protection from radiation and providing a permanent CO2 source.

https://bit.ly/3B78L1H

https://skfb.ly/o7FpB

Space Agency Data

Having the ability to search and read through out the NASA Databases, is big chance in our opinion. Despite of reading articles before the Space Apps, we came across so many new ones. Especially the Veggie and the APH drew our attention. It gave us the opinion of doing a soilless agriculture project. Searching for our design, there is not much of a information about a hydroponic or aeroponic system in space. That's the moment where NASA articles helped us so much. Learning the methods of a system that really worked on space was so essential for us and they had a huge impact on our project.

Hackathon Journey

Our experience in Space Apps has a great impact on our vision for the combination of science and technology. We've always had some interest in it, but we haven't been able to see our own potential. We were looking for answers to our challenge, but it ended up with even more. Our team members found their own individual interests, and they had the opportunity to progress through these interests. At first, even we couldn't believe that we would end up like this, we wanted to do something that's for sure, but we were very clueless. Thanks to our mentors who showed us our ways through this journey and thanks to Space Apps Challenge for offering this enlightening opportunity.

References

Global Judging

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.

Istanbul | Have seeds will travel!