High-Level Project Summary
As Space Agencies plan to send humans farther into space than ever before, one of the biggest obstacles they will face is growing their own food. Long duration spaceflights to the Moon or Mars will require a larger number of crops which would need to feed the entire crew while handling the body’s daily nutrient requirement. FOG, a new system designed for effective growing of plants in micro-gravity, gives a significant advantage as it follows a fogponic system which is a combination of principles used by closed-loop Hydroponic systems and the introduction of fog/mist as a medium of water and nutrient transport.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Here’s a description of how things will go about on the space vehicle if FOG is considered for crop production:
The crew will rely on pre-packaged food for the first half of the flight, once depart starts the collapsible cylindrical structures can open up to take the space used initially by the pre-packaged food. The user fills the water packet and nutrients packet. Seeds will come fixed to horizontal mesh intervals inside the enclosed cylinder. A press of a button ensures the start of the nebulizer that slowly generates micro-aerosol droplets, which float above the crop canopy for even distribution of nutrients. The plants start to germinate inside the cylinder which can be viewed by the crewmates through its transparent material. The condenser takes in the excess/risen (used) mist/fog and converts it to a liquid for easier storage in the outlet packet. The outlet packet essentially stored the vapors let off by the plants, excess of mist and oxygen. This outlet liquid can then be used to perform other tasks or help other system such as those used for the crewmates’ breathing environment.
Overall, this system ensures that it is able to grow a large number of crops while requiring less space and handling all intakes and outlets on its own with little to no manual work required to do by the crewmates. The systems design is simple and does not have complex moving parts hence the probability o having failures or malfunctions is less.
Space Agency Data
The Blog-post by NASA regarding its present systems and machines used to grow crops aboard the international space station or any other space vehicle was of great use as it helped me look at problems currently faced by the aerospace industry while dealing with crop producton and game me the opportunity to eliminate any idea that was already in use. which indeed led to the thought that is one of the central pillars of my project and that is - why not use fogponics?
Hackathon Journey
This was my second Space Apps experience and was by far the best! The challenges were all amazing but the one that stood out to me the most was the have seeds will travel. Growing crops in space will definitely be an outstanding achievement and thus participating in this hackathon and putting forward my idea was of such great importance. I wanted to put my best foot forward which required time and here's where I found a loophole, I live in Mumbai which is, according to science 62 minutes ahead of India's standard time that takes Kolkata's location into account, I've definitely used these 62 minutes wisely :). Over these 2 days I have learnt a lot from germination and transpiration to product design and systems and for this i'm really thankful to Space Apps and their team.
References
(NOTE - fogponics and aeroponics are used interchangeably as the indicate to the same form of system)
1) fogponics
3) is fogponics better? (An indian Study)
Tags
#FOG #haveseedswilltravel #spacetravel #fogponics #aeroponics
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.