Inspiration 3 🚀

Awards & Nominations

Inspiration 3 🚀 has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Mother Knows Best

High-Level Project Summary

Mother Knows Best (MKB), is a modular, automated crop production system that takes into account factors affecting plant growth and complexities of space. MKB uses minimal space during early stages of long-duration missions, providing more space for other payloads. The system gives crew the flexibility to grow plants in batches when storage space is freed up on the shuttle. It also controls irrigation to minimise crew interaction. Veggie andAPH aren’t built for scale making it inefficient to provide fresh food to supplement the crew’s diet for long-duration missions. Our system takes the advantages of both existing systems and brings it to the operational level for crop production.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://github.com/firew0rks/spaceapps-2021/blob/master/Demo%20Slides.pdf

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/firew0rks/spaceapps-2021

Detailed Project Description

MKB involves 4 major components:

Mother Unit (MU)
Structural Mounting Assembly (SMA)
Growth Chamber System (GCS)
PONDS Multi-unit (PONDS-MU)

The MU is the central control unit for our system and also serves as the interface for the crew, while the modular design of the SMA and the GCS allows the system to be deployed at any scale depending on the needs at the time. The PONDS-MU are individual pods that contain the growing medium with embedded nutrients and a set of seeds arranged in a linear configuration.

Below are our considerations and key design decisions that allowed us to land on the final design.

Considerations

We looked at what the key components for plant growth were and identified 4 key areas: nutrients, light, environment and growing medium.
Other key areas that were considered were taste, nutritional value, grow time, visibility of growth, automation and sanitisation.
Accounting for the complexities of a space environment: no/low gravity, lack of natural resources, radiation and limited stowage volume
Autonomy of the system to reduce manual effort for maintaining the produce

Key Design Decisions

Leafy green salad vegetables and micro-greens were selected because minimal preparation is required before consumption, produces high yields with short growing times, requires low space, and is high in micronutrients. Macronutrients will still primarily be from prepackaged foods
Leveraging the phototropism property of plants and no/low gravity environments, we save space by growing plants on their side and stacking PONDS-MU systems to maximise space utilisation
Wick system for the transportation of water to ensure the right level of water gets delivered to the plants. In case of system failures, the plants are still able to continue to grow as the store of water is still available to the plants
Radiation protection through readily available PET material to provide a shielding for the produce
Providing a more economical and space efficient design by grouping 5 plants into a single PONDS-MU along with a dedicated GCS with its own lighting, camera and environment sensors.
Each PONDS-MU will contain the same plants but each GCS can be independently configured to grow crops under different conditions
Environment sensors and camera can be tailored to monitor the specific crop it’s growing, leveraging machine learning to determine growth abnormalities
All key components can be taken apart and stowed away until they are ready to be deployed

The system is embedded with an intelligent control system which monitors plants in each GCS which minimises the need for crew interaction and effort. Using a modular design, the scale of crop production is flexible depending on the available space/volume at given time on the shuttle.

Benefits

Scalable through modularity
No additional nutrients required to be brought on board and mixed together, leveraging the advancements made by Veggie and PONDS
Mostly automated, with limited manual intervention and labour
Uses an automated nutrient delivery system driven through the MU and monitored through the interface and ground staff
Only labour required is to assemble the system and plug in and switch out PONDS-MU units and to replace/refill the tanks when required
Minimum configuration of 6 PONDS-MU’s will be provided to supplement nutrition for a crew of 4, for a month. If a staggered planting process is performed, then the crew can produce and harvest fresh produce continuously.
Assumptions: Modelled after lettuce. Each head of lettuce is 8-10 servings, with each crew member consuming 1 serve per meal (lunch and dinner). 8 servings per day for a crew of 4. Each PONDS-MU unit will produce enough produce to last 5 days. 6 PONDS-MU units will produce food for 30 days
Use of origami design to make the GCS retractable for storage while providing structural stability through telescopic rods

We hope some of these ideas provided will be taken up in the development of the crop production facility to help supplement the micronutrient needs for the first space crew for Mars.

Space Agency Data

Challenge Page Resource

Advanced Plant Habitat fact sheet
Veggie fact sheet

NASA articles found on website

Images and videos from NASA Image and Video Library, such as:

https://images.nasa.gov/details-KSC-20170808-PH_CSH01_0023.html
https://images.nasa.gov/details-ISS-Downlink-Video_Acaba-VEG-03-Experiment_Veggie_HD-DL-5_2017_269_1128_566623_hires.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGR3FiEkBwA
And everything we could find on Veggie and APH

Hackathon Journey

Spaceapps challenge was super interesting! We have a mixed interest in plants and space, so choosing this challenge was a no brainer. We’ve been able to learn more about the space environment and using our understanding of plants, we were able to adapt it to a space environment while also furthering our knowledge of plants. We were also very impressed at how much public information was freely provided by NASA, allowing us to answer most of our initial questions and validate our assumptions.

We would like to thank the staff and SMEs who were available to us all weekend and answered our questions. We would also like to thank NASA for providing a mountain of publicly available information on their website through their countless research projects.