Universal Unicorns

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13SLuCamkapJp9wyI1dTbSCjrGcvzA2Ag/view

https://smoggy-beak-721.notion.site/c1de3fef16a4490a821303d59a1daff1?v=8d2df0fcee2d4ce39a49fa9cd3794ad7

The Problem:

One of the biggest problems for space travel is mass and volume. As of 2021, it takes around 10,000 dollars to send one pound of material to space! Any chance of decreasing the weight of a space shuttle means less fuel is needed and therefore, it’s less expensive for astronauts to get into space in the first place. Volume is another issue; because there is limited space on the rocket, we need to provide a system that takes up as little room as possible while still giving the plants a healthy environment to grow in. 

There are currently no systems set in place to allow long-term growth of plants–long enough for fruits to form on a regular basis. This has to be tackled if we are to supply the astronauts with the vital nutrients that they would otherwise be lacking. 

Another big issue with space travel is waste management. Astronauts accumulate thousands of pounds of waste that must be carried with them until they touch back down on Earth. In addition to adding to the trash on Earth, this adds to the weight of the spacecraft. We wanted to create a solution that tackled not only the weight, volume, and food production issues of space travel, but also solved the greater issue of waste in space.

The Solution:

Essentially, AeroPrint is a self-sufficient aeroponic system 3D printed from recycled food packages. We were fortunate enough to get some insight from a previous NASA professional who has experience with plant production on our solution. He validated the concept by saying, “That sounds like a great idea! Anything that can be reused in space à la circular economies or bioregenerative life support systems is always going to be needed in space.” A breakdown of the solution:

1.3D Printing and Deploying: One of the core aspects of our solution is focusing on a minimal waste system that takes in food packages as filament into the 3D printer. To validate the feasibility of this facet of our solution, we looked into research discussing the current use and applications. 3D printing is already being used in space to create small tools, such as wrenches, out of recycled material. In addition, research has also been conducted to prototype rudimentary surgical tools made via 3D printers. After surgeons conducted simulation preparation including incising and draping tasks, the 3D printed tools were ultimately deemed acceptable.

Astronauts store their food in low-density polyethylene plastic, which is normally single-use. Once astronauts consume pre-packaged food, the leftover plastic is sterilized and shredded before being melted down to create a polyethylene filament. The filament is then used to 3D print a series of cylinders that create our aeroponic system. This uses up any food storage packaging while making room for the system in place and contains less weight than any other system.

2. Aeroponic System: The layout of our aeroponic system is a large circle made of vertical tubes. Our system contains an elevator inside each of the tubes. The platform is suspended by 4 wires that go through the entire tube to allow free movement up and down. This platform has 4 nozzles/sprinklers on it, and as the platform goes down the shaft, it sprays the roots of the plants with nutrient-filled water. The nutrients in the water will be specifically tailored to the needs of the plant species growing in this tube. LED lights will surround the circle of tubes as well as be positioned in the center of the circle. To ensure even “sunlight”, each cylinder will rotate on its own axis.

3. Machine Learning Customization: The machine learning portion has 2 parts: the upkeep of the crops, and the designing of the towers. Data will be collected about the plants via cameras and sensors. The ML will use the data to optimize the nutrients, temperature, O2, and CO2 levels of the plants. This has already been done here on earth through Google X Mineral - which also uses ML to optimize plant yields. ML will also be used to optimize the design of the towers that will be printed. Different plants require different designs, different planets (gravity) will require different designs. This has already been done in some part by you guys (NASA JPL) next-generation lander. We’ll be using generative design to design new towers!

4. Psychological Benefits: Beyond the health benefits of having fresh produce as opposed to freeze-dried food, our solution would also present mental health benefits. The system was specifically designed to be semi-transparent, allowing astronauts a daily glimpse at the progress of their seedlings. The issue of mental health in space and its correlation with plants has especially received attention lately from the NASA Human Research Facility. Earlier this year, Dr. Gioia Massa and her team have started conducting studies at the ISS to learn more about the impacts.

5. Sanitation & Cleanliness: In Space, it’s especially important that the food we eat remains free of harmful microorganisms and bacteria. To take care of this, we got inspiration from a creature on earth: the shark. Sharkskin has a diamond-shaped micropattern on it that is difficult for bacteria to attach to, making it naturally antibacterial. With a precise 3d printer, we’re able to print this pattern onto the outside of our aeroponic grow structure to protect against any potential microorganisms that might have slipped into orbit with us. 

With these multiple modalities, we plan to create a holistic end-to-end solution that will be sustainable in the long run. 

Current Methods and Our Improvements:

The current method of food storage has been used since we first sent astronauts to the moon: food is freeze-dried and/or vacuum-sealed, similar to MREs in the military. Although pouch-sealing equipment is extremely useful to save space, ensure sterility, and lengthen the shelf life of foods, using it means that astronauts end up throwing out all of the individual wrappers after consuming the food. This trash accumulates at one end of the ship in large bags that are either burnt up on re-entry or taken to landfills back on Earth. Each astronaut can accumulate up to 1095 lbs of plastic waste on a round trip to Mars, and that’s only accounting for food packaging waste–nothing else.

NASA has been working to combat this problem and provide fresh produce to astronauts on longer missions. VEGGIE is a space garden on the International Space Station used to study plant growth in microgravity and grow up to six plants while easily distributing water, nutrients, and air. This system uses LEDs to produce the proper light spectrum for plant growth, making the chamber a magenta pink color. They’ve grown lettuce, cabbage, kale, flowers, and more!

APH is another growth chamber for plant research used by NASA. They also use LED lights but operate in an entirely closed and automated system with over 180 sensors for both water recovery and temperature tracking, among other things. 

Neither system currently resolves the issue of waste management in space nor is the most efficient way of growing plant matter away from Earth. Our system combines the LED aspect of VEGGIE and the automation of APH and utilizes 3D printing to minimize extra weight on the spacecraft. We use the 1095 lbs of wasted plastic per astronaut to turn into filament to build our system, meaning that over a thousand pounds of otherwise single-use plastic is going to be good use and feeding astronauts over the course of three years. 

We also accounted for the space that prepackaged food takes up on the space shuttle along with the mass. Each astronaut uses around 1.8 kg of food and packaging per day, meaning around 10.8 kg for six people. If we multiply that by the number of days they would be on the mission (in this example, we use 1095 for three years), that would be around 11826 kg of food and packaging total. The average density of this food is 800 kg / m^3 according to The Engineering Toolbox. If we take the mass of the food and divide it by the density, it equals out to around 14.78 m^3 for the volume of all the food and packaging. We would be utilizing this space for our model, therefore taking up less room and minimizing extra payload space that’s taken up by alternative machinery.

The growth period of our plants is also entirely hands-free for the astronauts. Once the filament is prepared, engineers can build the system and let the AI handle the rest of the plant growth. The plants grow until they’re ready to be picked and only then do the astronauts have to manually remove the fruit and greens from the rest of the plant matter. This semi-enclosed system allows astronauts to handle the more stressful aspects of space travel while knowing their food is growing in a safe and secure environment. The cylinder around the plant environment also allows for astronauts to monitor them from the outside.

The data we gathered from NASA’s previous research and data fact sheets was very useful as we began learning about the struggles of growing plants in outer space. At first, NASA’s Veggie was a big inspiration to us and we planned on creating a project very similar to it. Reading an article about how much plants boosted astronauts’ mental health inspired us to make it a system pretty enough that one could observe. After exploring some more of NASA’s research and getting wrapped up in fascinating things like the perfect LED hue for peak plant growth and the influence (or in this case, non-influence) of microgravity, we realized an agricultural system could really benefit from more smart sensors than Veggie has. These would allow a lot more data points to be tracked allowing for greater autonomy in the growing process. In the end, it was the data-rich fact sheets provided on Veggie and APH that had the most influence over our project. Additionally, we reviewed the data on data.nasa.gov and found a useful study related to Thermoplastic Feedstock for 3D Printed Parts with Metal-Like Strength, Phase I, shedding light for us on current gaps and state of additive manufacturing. 

Overall, we thought Space Apps was a great way to learn all about an area in space over just a weekend. Our team decided on the Have Seeds Will Travel challenge path because we were excited by the possibility of being able to deploy our solution both in Space and on Earth in impoverished areas with an abundance of trash. Because of this, we felt that this path had the potential for making the greatest impact. We approached this project with the intention of curiosity and learning. We wanted to make sure we learned all about different options currently out there before designing our own system to have the most perspective. What worked wonderfully was that everyone on our team came from different backgrounds so we were able to pull knowledge from a ton of different areas.

We did face quite a few setbacks, for example, we had the idea of growing mushrooms on organic waste from the plants we grew (stems, leaves, etc.) only to realize it wouldn’t provide enough nutrients for the mushrooms and would need to be extremely sterile so as not to compete with other fungi on board. Since this wasn’t something we could change, we decided to instead focus our energy on reducing waste in another way: repurposing tossed food packaging. 

We also wanted to include something surrounding 4D printing. We found a couple of articles on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory using “space chainmail” to protect astronauts and theorized that we could do something with that but quickly fell down a rabbit hole to nowhere. We’re grateful that we found this problem early on so it didn’t eat up too much of our time!

We’re so grateful to our mentors for suggesting this competition and our friends at The Knowledge Society for banding together and competing with us! They always push us to be the best versions of ourselves and we can’t wait for the next one!

https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/building-a-vertical-hydroponic-tower.html 

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/foods-materials-bulk-density-d_1819.html

https://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/could_astronauts_get_all_their_oxygen_from_algae_or_plants_and_their_food_also-156990

https://3dscanningservices.net/blog/streamlined-shark-skin-replicated-by-3d-printers/

https://nasa.fandom.com/wiki/Aeroponics

https://science.howstuffworks.com/space-food3.htm

https://theconversation.com/how-to-turn-plastic-waste-in-your-recycle-bin-into-profit-147081

https://science.nasa.gov/technology/technology-highlights/how-do-you-water-plants-in-space

https://www.nasa.gov/content/space-food-systems/

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/veggie_fact_sheet_508.pdf

https://science.nasa.gov/technology/technology-highlights/how-do-you-water-plants-in-space

https://asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/sciences/food-production/growing-healthy-food-in-space-and-remote-areas.asp

https://www.nasa.gov/content/growing-plants-in-space

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/background/facts/astp.html

#space #spaceexploration #tech #technology #future #innovation

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