Space Farmers

Red Planet Vertical Farm

High-Level Project Summary

We made a design for our solution to our challenge and we call it VertiFarm. Red PlanetVertical Farm is a small and flexible crop production system that we designed for planting crops on a mission to other planets. We made a watering and lighting system for the space environment. We also put charcoal in our soil because it is a very interesting local wisdom.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DAZICpJ5YUVkGziAiBX1XlCccTcbQkzj3-w6LElydB4/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://sites.google.com/view/spacefarmers/home

Detailed Project Description

Our project is a deployable farm on Mars and it will work in both microgravity and partial gravity because the watering system will use pressure instead of depending on gravity to bring water into the soil. In addition, there will be sensors in the closed environment which will control the Infrared Light Bulbs, Lighting depending on the types of plants, humidity, and CO2 amounts in the closed environment. Also, our final design has a system of lighting which will add different wavelengths of light to the environment which will provoke different responses from the plant. This benefits the astronauts because the system is autonomous and the calculations will be worked on by the microcontroller. Although we didn't think too much about the calculations behind the scenes, we feel like this project we made, Red Planet Vertical Farm, will be able to provide long term food support for the astronauts going on long term mission to Mars and back.

***Extra Information can be Accessed on our Final Project Sites***

Space Agency Data

From Nasa :

CDRA (Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly)

Veggie

APH

Sabatier System

Nasa's Space Nutrition Book

Hackathon Journey

Through our journey in the Space Apps Challenge, we have learnt many things including teamwork, softskills to information about plants, space, and systems that are implemented in space such as the CDRA and Sabatier System. We were inspired to choose this challenge because one of our teammates was very interested in the topic of growing plants in space. In addition, we also chose this challenge because this is not something we see everyday such as creating games. We started the project off with researching as much as we could. After that, we compiled the important details such as the plants we used, how we could implement Nasa's already existing systems and how we could increase plant production up in space along with how to deal with a micro-gravity environment. Finally, we created a website to present to the judges and to show what we have done over the 2 days we worked on this project together. A setback we had was the time we could spend together and coordinate our actions. Although other teams used zoom to work on their meetings, we had used our time more wisely when we were actually working together in the real world. This made it so that our weeks of research was slow which meant we had to compile our work, create a presentation, and turn our project in in the span of 2 days. We would like the Nasa team for creating this challenge to provide students and adults around the world a chance to work with new people and experience learning new things about the space and to be able to contribute our ideas straight to Nasa which could be implemented into the real world and make a difference.

Space Farmers

Bangkok | Have seeds will travel!