Plants in Space
I recently read an article in The Montreal Gazette about space farming. I found it very interesting when Professor Mike Dixon Director of CESRF at University of
Guelph was quoted as saying, "In the future all astronauts will be vegetarians." For a long time I’ve thought that the ultimate in indoor gardens are going to be in outer space!
Professor Dixon is one of world’s leading authorities on Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture. So I gave Professor Dixon a call and asked him a few questions.
Interview with Professor Mike Dixon: Director of the Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility, and its Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture program at the Ontario Agricultural College, University of Guelph
October 24, 2008
Fred: How did you start, as a gardener or as a scientist?
Mike: Scientist.
Fred: Yes. When did you become interested in growing plants in space?
Mike: About 15 years ago, I guess.
Fred: And how did that start?
Mike: That’s a rather convoluted story. Just by chance really.
Fred: Well what was your field before that?
Mike: I was trained as a plant physiologist. I actually did my PhD in the forestry department at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I came from Mount Allison in plant biology basically.
Fred: What is Advanced Life Support Agriculture?
Mike: It is one of the more recent acronyms applied to systems required for human life support in space and it includes biological systems as well as conventional physical, chemical systems that we currently use on space station and on the shuttle.
Fred: So are you talking about replacing these chemical systems?
Mike: In the long term, yes. In the short term, by that I mean the next thirty or forty years.
Fred: Can you give me an example of one system?
Mike: The system that scrubs carbon dioxide out of the air or the system that takes bottled oxygen and releases it into the atmosphere of the space station or the food.
Fred: Can you tell us what a grow chamber on a space ship is going to be like?
Mike: In the near term our research does not look at putting plant production systems other than small scale experimental and so called “salad machines” on space ships because the requirements for long term life support on a space ship is not, we don’t have that yet. It only takes three days to get to the Moon and six months to get Mars and we can carry enough food to handle that without having to grow it, besides the mass and energy cost of a food production system is too much.
Fred: So those grow chambers will be just experiments and won’t be used as biofilters?
Mike: We’re using them as test beds to test systems to figure out how to do it on the Moon and Mars. What size of plant production area do we need for a crew of six? What kind of crops and how would we grow them? The horticultural management strategies for growing wheat, soy beans, beans, peas and corn on the Moon are quite different than they are here. We have to redo all of human agricultural practices under different environmental conditions.
Fred: Is there a short list of plants that are probably going to be the first ones grown?
Mike: In terms of food for 100% of life support requirements for the crew, the list is up to about forty now. However we won’t be at 100%, certainly not in our short life time using plants. We’ll still have to rely on conventional physical chemical systems as plants get more and more developed as a life support system. Early on it will be mostly short term vegetative crops like lettuce, radishes, and so called salad crops, spring onions.
Fred: Tomatoes?
Mike: Tomatoes that would be the next class of crops. They would be the crops that bear fruit; like tomatoes and peppers, potatoes, don’t bear fruit but they grow tubers and soy beans, wheat, rice.
Fred: What sort of grow mediums could be used in space and what will probably be use?
Mike: You have to differentiate what the average person thinks of as space. The average person thinks conventionally like the International Space Station and microgravity applications and all of our research is aimed at planetary based, where there’s going be some gravity, there will be an up and a down so that broadens the scope of potential production systems that you could use. You could use simple nutrient film which is just water re-circulating with the appropriate recipe of nutrients; nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and all the micronutrients that plants require in a specified diet, circulating indefinitely. Or we could start to use things like the sub-straight from the Moon or Mars, the actual so called, “regolith”, which is just a term for the dirt on the surface and use that as a hydroponic sub-straight, an inert structural contribution to the root system.
Fred: How does gravity affect or lack of gravity affect plants’ growth?
Mike: So far the experiments that have been done on space stations, since the Russians were working on MIR, and I’ve participated on some wheat experiments on an international space station with NASA, and plants typically replace up with light and down with water, so where the water is is down and where the light is is up and they sort of grow their roots in the down direction towards the water and they grow their phothynsetic architecture, their green parts up towards where the light is. You can have that in microgravity, you can have that anywhere. You can have it completely upside down. The plants will behave more or less normally if they have enough light at the right temperature and the right nutrients. They behave more or less normally, so they’re not that confused by up and down.
Fred: When do you think there’ll be a greenhouse on the Moon?
Mike: We’re just at this moment proposing the initial Canadian participation in a plant growth system on the Moon. It won’t necessarily be what we conventionally think of as a greenhouse. It’ll be a chamber about the size of a breadbox, really, that will grow just small seedlings of a guinea pig test crop, probably Arabidopsis, which is the guinea pig of the plant world. The genome has been mapped completely and we use it to fiddle around with environmental conditions and stress factures and see how plants respond genetically. We’ll probably do that in collaboration with NASA and the European space agency and grow the first plant on the Moon.
Fred: Wow. Production greenhouses on the Moon, will they be in rows like greenhouses on the Earth or would they be underground in tunnels?
Mike: One of the big issues that we’re dealing with here at Guelph is the pressure. As you know the Moon is virtually a vacuum and there’s no atmosphere on the Moon so that means that your structural system will have to have full earth atmosphere and full earth pressure. The mass of the greenhouse would be enormous to sustain that pressure differential between the inside and the outside. So we’re asking how low can you take the pressure and still have plants perform all the functions of human life support; which is food production, atmosphere revitalization with oxygen and CO2 update, and recycling of fresh water as well as a little waste management. So far plants don’t seem to mind pressures down as low as 1/10 of Earth’s atmospheric pressure as long as the temperatures and light levels are adequate for them to perform photosynthetic chemistry and just grow normally, and they do. We found virtually no differences until the oxygen becomes limiting. So oxygen is the key, the critical environmental atmospheric… maintaining a minimal threshold of oxygen. In Earth’s atmosphere we have almost 21% of oxygen and that’s the environment that plants have grown up to expect. If we’re working at one tenth of Earth’s atmosphere, even if it was all oxygen, you’re already at less than half of what oxygen there is in the atmosphere here on Earth. It turns out plants don’t mind that as long as there is a critical threshold of oxygen, which turns out to be about 6 or 7 kilopascals out of 100. If we’re down at a total of 10 kilopascals then your oxygen atmosphere is about 60-70%.
Fred: So probably, they are going to be completely underground chambers?
Mike: Well, the underground part is quite likely at the current. But there is a lot of things we don’t know yet, and that is the radiation environment on the Moon. How will plants be affected by that? And that will be among the first questions that we ask when we start growing the first plants on the Moon. We’ll do it in a non radiation protected system so that we can ask that question and get the plants to tell us.
Fred: How different is the greenhouse on Mars going to be from the one on the Moon?
Mike: Not much actually because it will have the same kinds of pressures. Mars is virtually a vacuum. It is only 0.6 kilopascals in total and it’s almost all carbon dioxide, which is a good thing because you need carbon dioxide to grow plants, so we could use that In-Situ Resource, so called. And happily the Phoenix mission confirmed that there’s plenty of water on Mars, frozen, just under the surface. The prospect of going to Mars… there will be different technologies associated with the greenhouse on Mars than there is on the Moon. But in many respects it will identical. The Moon will be a handy proving ground for a lot of the technologies that we ultimately deploy on Mars.
Fred: Will the space farms be using artificial lighting or sunshine?
Mike: Both I would think. Sunshine is obviously free but in order to get it you have to expose yourself to cosmic radiation and once again those will be among the science questions that we ask of plant physiology and genomics when we get on the Moon and Mars. Do you mind being out here in the cosmic radiation while we steal a little sunlight for photosynthesis? If the answer is they do mind, in other wards if it starts to mess up their genetic coding and create the tomato that ate Mars kind of thing, then we’ll have to look at radiation shielding which of course prohibits free access to solar radiation since its all part of the package. Then we’ll have to come up with supplementary lighting options like light emitting diodes which have advanced in their technology recently to quite a high level.
Fred: But they don’t produce UV.
Mike: That’s true.
Fred: Isn’t that’s essential for a lot of plant action?
Mike: Well blue light; not necessarily ultraviolet but certainly blue light at various wave lengths is required for flowering plants, many for reproductive activity but not a lot. It only needs about 7-10% of the total light quantity that you give to a plant. There are definitely diodes in the blue part of the spectrum, they’ve got red and maybe even now produce white diodes, obviously. You’ve seen them in the flashlights that you buy at Canadian Tire. The technology of light emitting diodes and the florescent chemistry or whatever it is creates the light from that has become very sophisticated and very high powered which is desirable because you need quite a lot of light for photosynthesis.
Fred: Can you tell us about any of the spin-offs from your research?
Mike: Certainly. Although the technical pull for everything that we do in the controlled environment systems research facility here at Guelph, is that of wanting to go to the Moon or Mars and grow plants for human life support, they say that’s the pull. But the driving force is the industrial collaboration with…the driving force is the technology transfer to terrestrial applications and among them are things like, we started looking at atmosphere management; oxygen and CO2 obviously, but all the trace volatile organics that typically contaminate sealed spaces in the atmosphere, off gases from both plants and materials that you would have in a space station type structure. In dealing with those biologically we’ve developed what we call biological filters or biofilters for short and that has spun off into a company called “Air Quality Solutions” populated by some of my colleagues and ex-gradate students and they have commercialized biological filtration of indoor air to combat “sick building syndrome” in institutional buildings and large office towers and that sort of thing. They’re coming up with domestic applications and industrial applications in paint shops and car shops and things like that. So it’s expanded quite a bit. This year actually the company was purchased by a bigger company, which is the way of things, and they’re going on to bigger and better things, more power to them.
Fred: I know about the world largest biofilter, the one that’s four stories tall in the auditorium at the Guelph-Humber Building in Toronto: These biofilters are they going to make them much smaller?
Mike: Yeah, they’re definitely making them much smaller, down to office size spaces like literally the size of a breadbox.
Fred: At that size are they going to be effective?
Mike: Absolutely, yeah. Another issue is when you go to space, you can’t throw anything away. There’s no such thing as garbage. So that being the case you must recycle everything and recycling technologies are still relatively crude actually when you come down to consider that you must recycle absolutely every molecule of everything you take onto the Moon or Mars because it’s a question of survival now, it’s not a question of being environmentally friendly. Recycling the growth medium, we worked with a company locally and developed a recyclable plant growth medium that is now made commercially available in the greenhouse sector to replace rock wool.
Fred: And what’s the base material? Is it polyester or cocoa?
Mike: It’s actually a plastic. It is a fully recyclable in the 2, it has the 2 in the recycle triangle which means it goes into the same circuit as your plastic water bottles and stuff like that. So anyway that came out of this project not too long ago. Then we’re also looking at pathogen control. There will be microbes that are undesirable that accumulate in your ecosystem on the Moon and you don’t have the luxury because the ecosystem doesn’t have a lot of capacity, it’s not very big and you don’t have the luxury of using toxic chemistry to control undesirable pathogens so we have a requirement on the Moon for a non-toxic residue disinfection system and that lead us to collaborate with another local company that has developed aqueous ozone disinfection system where they dissolve ozone and water and they’re now spinning that off into domestic application, in the kitchen and use it in the salad spinner, makes your roses last for two or three weeks, there’s all kinds of applications.
Fred: And the tomatosphere program how is that going and how do you use that data?
Mike: The tomatosphere program is remarkable. It started in 2000 with some seeds that Mark Garneau took up into space for us and we distributed them to about 2500 classrooms across Canada. This year, in 2008 school year, we had over 11000 classrooms sign up for tomatosphere across Canada and some in the States, of course but mostly in Canada. We distributed seeds from a variety of different treatments. We come up with different treatments every year, including 19 months on the international space station, a week in a Mars simulation chamber at Kennedy Space Center or a week in a simulated space exposure which is a vacuum of -90°C or we sent them up to our Mars analog greenhouse on Devon Island in the Canadian High Antarctic and left ½ million seeds there for a year an see how they like that. We have all of these different incremental advances in extreme exposure of these seeds and just to test will they germinate and will they grow with any vigor? These students, grades 3-5 and 8-10 that’s two different streams of the curriculum that we have, it integrates with the Pan Canadian Science curriculum nutritional science, space science, plant science. It’s sort of one stop shopping for the science teacher of those grades. They’ve taken a hold of it and as I say 11,000 classrooms this year and probably going to push 12 or 13,000 classrooms next year, as we continue.
Fred: That’s a lot of students and a lot of experiments going on.
Mike: Yes and the great thing is that the data they get, especially the germination data, which even a ten year old can’t screw up, is remarkably reliable. After the first hundred classes report their data the variation in the entire country is almost infinitesimally, it’s not measurable. The variation among the data that comes from all the classes is almost identical across the country and it’s identical with the concurrent experiment that we run here at the university.
Fred: It’s really good confirmation.
Mike: Absolutely.
Fred: About that data, has there been a group of seeds that you know have been exposed to these outrageous extremes and surprised you and have actually germinated?
Mike: Yes. When we put them in the Mars simulation chamber at the Kennedy Space Center I figured the ultraviolet radiation and the extreme temperature and the extreme low pressure for such a long would have a profoundly different effect than it did and in fact the tomato seeds came out with absolutely no ill effects. Basically you can take Heinz tomato seeds and do anything to them and they’re like to old Timex Marlin.
Fred: Keeps going. One last question. Would you like to be part of a space mission some day?
Mike: Yeah, except that I suffer from motion sickness which I understand is a considerable ailment among astronauts. When you see a group of six astronauts up there and only five of them are in the picture, the other one is behind the camera woofing his cookies because of the motion sickness problem. I think I would probably be… although I would love to go to the Moon.
Fred: Have you actually try to find a way in to space?
Mike: No. There is a current search for Canadian astronauts. The next pool of Canadian astronauts, three of my students applied and one of them is still on the short list, so there’s still some hope that this program will generate an astronaut. We’ll certainly generate the training protocols for the horticultural mission specialists that will be participating in Canada’s contribution to exploration in years to come.
Thank you Professor Dixon.
do do do
Fred
To learn more you can go to http://www.ces.uoguelph.ca/index.shtml
That recyclable plant growth medium that Mike was talking about is Agri-LITE™ made by SIR Petro Chemical, which is a green petro chemical company. The thing I find remarkable about this company is that they make a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine that is small enough to go almost anywhere. http://www.oilsponge.com/
Tomatosphere
Tomatosphere is an educational outreach project involving more than 10,000 classrooms across Canada, the United States and a few other countries but mostly in Canada.
In the spring of each year since 2001, classrooms from grades 2 to 10 have been given 2 sets of tomato seeds and a protocol to conduct experiments, on the effects of space and space travel on the growth of plants and seeds.
In the lower grades the experiments are only a few weeks long, just long enough for the seeds to germinate and grow into seedlings. In the higher grades the experiments can go further and involve more science.
The prospect of being involved, first hand, in space experiments is very exciting to kids!
To learn more go to http://www.tomatosphere.org
Tomatosphere is sponsored by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, Heinz Canada, H.J. Heinz Company Foundation, Ontario Centres of Excellence, Stokes Seeds and the University of Guelph.
Indoor Gardener October 2008
I recently read an article in The Montreal Gazette about space farming. I found it very interesting when Professor Mike Dixon Director of CESRF at University of
Guelph was quoted as saying, "In the future all astronauts will be vegetarians." For a long time I’ve thought that the ultimate in indoor gardens are going to be in outer space!
Professor Dixon is one of world’s leading authorities on Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture. So I gave Professor Dixon a call and asked him a few questions.
Interview with Professor Mike Dixon: Director of the Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility, and its Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture program at the Ontario Agricultural College, University of Guelph
October 24, 2008
Fred: How did you start, as a gardener or as a scientist?
Mike: Scientist.
Fred: Yes. When did you become interested in growing plants in space?
Mike: About 15 years ago, I guess.
Fred: And how did that start?
Mike: That’s a rather convoluted story. Just by chance really.
Fred: Well what was your field before that?
Mike: I was trained as a plant physiologist. I actually did my PhD in the forestry department at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I came from Mount Allison in plant biology basically.
Fred: What is Advanced Life Support Agriculture?
Mike: It is one of the more recent acronyms applied to systems required for human life support in space and it includes biological systems as well as conventional physical, chemical systems that we currently use on space station and on the shuttle.
Fred: So are you talking about replacing these chemical systems?
Mike: In the long term, yes. In the short term, by that I mean the next thirty or forty years.
Fred: Can you give me an example of one system?
Mike: The system that scrubs carbon dioxide out of the air or the system that takes bottled oxygen and releases it into the atmosphere of the space station or the food.
Fred: Can you tell us what a grow chamber on a space ship is going to be like?
Mike: In the near term our research does not look at putting plant production systems other than small scale experimental and so called “salad machines” on space ships because the requirements for long term life support on a space ship is not, we don’t have that yet. It only takes three days to get to the Moon and six months to get Mars and we can carry enough food to handle that without having to grow it, besides the mass and energy cost of a food production system is too much.
Fred: So those grow chambers will be just experiments and won’t be used as biofilters?
Mike: We’re using them as test beds to test systems to figure out how to do it on the Moon and Mars. What size of plant production area do we need for a crew of six? What kind of crops and how would we grow them? The horticultural management strategies for growing wheat, soy beans, beans, peas and corn on the Moon are quite different than they are here. We have to redo all of human agricultural practices under different environmental conditions.
Fred: Is there a short list of plants that are probably going to be the first ones grown?
Mike: In terms of food for 100% of life support requirements for the crew, the list is up to about forty now. However we won’t be at 100%, certainly not in our short life time using plants. We’ll still have to rely on conventional physical chemical systems as plants get more and more developed as a life support system. Early on it will be mostly short term vegetative crops like lettuce, radishes, and so called salad crops, spring onions.
Fred: Tomatoes?
Mike: Tomatoes that would be the next class of crops. They would be the crops that bear fruit; like tomatoes and peppers, potatoes, don’t bear fruit but they grow tubers and soy beans, wheat, rice.
Fred: What sort of grow mediums could be used in space and what will probably be use?
Mike: You have to differentiate what the average person thinks of as space. The average person thinks conventionally like the International Space Station and microgravity applications and all of our research is aimed at planetary based, where there’s going be some gravity, there will be an up and a down so that broadens the scope of potential production systems that you could use. You could use simple nutrient film which is just water re-circulating with the appropriate recipe of nutrients; nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and all the micronutrients that plants require in a specified diet, circulating indefinitely. Or we could start to use things like the sub-straight from the Moon or Mars, the actual so called, “regolith”, which is just a term for the dirt on the surface and use that as a hydroponic sub-straight, an inert structural contribution to the root system.
Fred: How does gravity affect or lack of gravity affect plants’ growth?
Mike: So far the experiments that have been done on space stations, since the Russians were working on MIR, and I’ve participated on some wheat experiments on an international space station with NASA, and plants typically replace up with light and down with water, so where the water is is down and where the light is is up and they sort of grow their roots in the down direction towards the water and they grow their phothynsetic architecture, their green parts up towards where the light is. You can have that in microgravity, you can have that anywhere. You can have it completely upside down. The plants will behave more or less normally if they have enough light at the right temperature and the right nutrients. They behave more or less normally, so they’re not that confused by up and down.
Fred: When do you think there’ll be a greenhouse on the Moon?
Mike: We’re just at this moment proposing the initial Canadian participation in a plant growth system on the Moon. It won’t necessarily be what we conventionally think of as a greenhouse. It’ll be a chamber about the size of a breadbox, really, that will grow just small seedlings of a guinea pig test crop, probably Arabidopsis, which is the guinea pig of the plant world. The genome has been mapped completely and we use it to fiddle around with environmental conditions and stress factures and see how plants respond genetically. We’ll probably do that in collaboration with NASA and the European space agency and grow the first plant on the Moon.
Fred: Wow. Production greenhouses on the Moon, will they be in rows like greenhouses on the Earth or would they be underground in tunnels?
Mike: One of the big issues that we’re dealing with here at Guelph is the pressure. As you know the Moon is virtually a vacuum and there’s no atmosphere on the Moon so that means that your structural system will have to have full earth atmosphere and full earth pressure. The mass of the greenhouse would be enormous to sustain that pressure differential between the inside and the outside. So we’re asking how low can you take the pressure and still have plants perform all the functions of human life support; which is food production, atmosphere revitalization with oxygen and CO2 update, and recycling of fresh water as well as a little waste management. So far plants don’t seem to mind pressures down as low as 1/10 of Earth’s atmospheric pressure as long as the temperatures and light levels are adequate for them to perform photosynthetic chemistry and just grow normally, and they do. We found virtually no differences until the oxygen becomes limiting. So oxygen is the key, the critical environmental atmospheric… maintaining a minimal threshold of oxygen. In Earth’s atmosphere we have almost 21% of oxygen and that’s the environment that plants have grown up to expect. If we’re working at one tenth of Earth’s atmosphere, even if it was all oxygen, you’re already at less than half of what oxygen there is in the atmosphere here on Earth. It turns out plants don’t mind that as long as there is a critical threshold of oxygen, which turns out to be about 6 or 7 kilopascals out of 100. If we’re down at a total of 10 kilopascals then your oxygen atmosphere is about 60-70%.
Fred: So probably, they are going to be completely underground chambers?
Mike: Well, the underground part is quite likely at the current. But there is a lot of things we don’t know yet, and that is the radiation environment on the Moon. How will plants be affected by that? And that will be among the first questions that we ask when we start growing the first plants on the Moon. We’ll do it in a non radiation protected system so that we can ask that question and get the plants to tell us.
Fred: How different is the greenhouse on Mars going to be from the one on the Moon?
Mike: Not much actually because it will have the same kinds of pressures. Mars is virtually a vacuum. It is only 0.6 kilopascals in total and it’s almost all carbon dioxide, which is a good thing because you need carbon dioxide to grow plants, so we could use that In-Situ Resource, so called. And happily the Phoenix mission confirmed that there’s plenty of water on Mars, frozen, just under the surface. The prospect of going to Mars… there will be different technologies associated with the greenhouse on Mars than there is on the Moon. But in many respects it will identical. The Moon will be a handy proving ground for a lot of the technologies that we ultimately deploy on Mars.
Fred: Will the space farms be using artificial lighting or sunshine?
Mike: Both I would think. Sunshine is obviously free but in order to get it you have to expose yourself to cosmic radiation and once again those will be among the science questions that we ask of plant physiology and genomics when we get on the Moon and Mars. Do you mind being out here in the cosmic radiation while we steal a little sunlight for photosynthesis? If the answer is they do mind, in other wards if it starts to mess up their genetic coding and create the tomato that ate Mars kind of thing, then we’ll have to look at radiation shielding which of course prohibits free access to solar radiation since its all part of the package. Then we’ll have to come up with supplementary lighting options like light emitting diodes which have advanced in their technology recently to quite a high level.
Fred: But they don’t produce UV.
Mike: That’s true.
Fred: Isn’t that’s essential for a lot of plant action?
Mike: Well blue light; not necessarily ultraviolet but certainly blue light at various wave lengths is required for flowering plants, many for reproductive activity but not a lot. It only needs about 7-10% of the total light quantity that you give to a plant. There are definitely diodes in the blue part of the spectrum, they’ve got red and maybe even now produce white diodes, obviously. You’ve seen them in the flashlights that you buy at Canadian Tire. The technology of light emitting diodes and the florescent chemistry or whatever it is creates the light from that has become very sophisticated and very high powered which is desirable because you need quite a lot of light for photosynthesis.
Fred: Can you tell us about any of the spin-offs from your research?
Mike: Certainly. Although the technical pull for everything that we do in the controlled environment systems research facility here at Guelph, is that of wanting to go to the Moon or Mars and grow plants for human life support, they say that’s the pull. But the driving force is the industrial collaboration with…the driving force is the technology transfer to terrestrial applications and among them are things like, we started looking at atmosphere management; oxygen and CO2 obviously, but all the trace volatile organics that typically contaminate sealed spaces in the atmosphere, off gases from both plants and materials that you would have in a space station type structure. In dealing with those biologically we’ve developed what we call biological filters or biofilters for short and that has spun off into a company called “Air Quality Solutions” populated by some of my colleagues and ex-gradate students and they have commercialized biological filtration of indoor air to combat “sick building syndrome” in institutional buildings and large office towers and that sort of thing. They’re coming up with domestic applications and industrial applications in paint shops and car shops and things like that. So it’s expanded quite a bit. This year actually the company was purchased by a bigger company, which is the way of things, and they’re going on to bigger and better things, more power to them.
Fred: I know about the world largest biofilter, the one that’s four stories tall in the auditorium at the Guelph-Humber Building in Toronto: These biofilters are they going to make them much smaller?
Mike: Yeah, they’re definitely making them much smaller, down to office size spaces like literally the size of a breadbox.
Fred: At that size are they going to be effective?
Mike: Absolutely, yeah. Another issue is when you go to space, you can’t throw anything away. There’s no such thing as garbage. So that being the case you must recycle everything and recycling technologies are still relatively crude actually when you come down to consider that you must recycle absolutely every molecule of everything you take onto the Moon or Mars because it’s a question of survival now, it’s not a question of being environmentally friendly. Recycling the growth medium, we worked with a company locally and developed a recyclable plant growth medium that is now made commercially available in the greenhouse sector to replace rock wool.
Fred: And what’s the base material? Is it polyester or cocoa?
Mike: It’s actually a plastic. It is a fully recyclable in the 2, it has the 2 in the recycle triangle which means it goes into the same circuit as your plastic water bottles and stuff like that. So anyway that came out of this project not too long ago. Then we’re also looking at pathogen control. There will be microbes that are undesirable that accumulate in your ecosystem on the Moon and you don’t have the luxury because the ecosystem doesn’t have a lot of capacity, it’s not very big and you don’t have the luxury of using toxic chemistry to control undesirable pathogens so we have a requirement on the Moon for a non-toxic residue disinfection system and that lead us to collaborate with another local company that has developed aqueous ozone disinfection system where they dissolve ozone and water and they’re now spinning that off into domestic application, in the kitchen and use it in the salad spinner, makes your roses last for two or three weeks, there’s all kinds of applications.
Fred: And the tomatosphere program how is that going and how do you use that data?
Mike: The tomatosphere program is remarkable. It started in 2000 with some seeds that Mark Garneau took up into space for us and we distributed them to about 2500 classrooms across Canada. This year, in 2008 school year, we had over 11000 classrooms sign up for tomatosphere across Canada and some in the States, of course but mostly in Canada. We distributed seeds from a variety of different treatments. We come up with different treatments every year, including 19 months on the international space station, a week in a Mars simulation chamber at Kennedy Space Center or a week in a simulated space exposure which is a vacuum of -90°C or we sent them up to our Mars analog greenhouse on Devon Island in the Canadian High Antarctic and left ½ million seeds there for a year an see how they like that. We have all of these different incremental advances in extreme exposure of these seeds and just to test will they germinate and will they grow with any vigor? These students, grades 3-5 and 8-10 that’s two different streams of the curriculum that we have, it integrates with the Pan Canadian Science curriculum nutritional science, space science, plant science. It’s sort of one stop shopping for the science teacher of those grades. They’ve taken a hold of it and as I say 11,000 classrooms this year and probably going to push 12 or 13,000 classrooms next year, as we continue.
Fred: That’s a lot of students and a lot of experiments going on.
Mike: Yes and the great thing is that the data they get, especially the germination data, which even a ten year old can’t screw up, is remarkably reliable. After the first hundred classes report their data the variation in the entire country is almost infinitesimally, it’s not measurable. The variation among the data that comes from all the classes is almost identical across the country and it’s identical with the concurrent experiment that we run here at the university.
Fred: It’s really good confirmation.
Mike: Absolutely.
Fred: About that data, has there been a group of seeds that you know have been exposed to these outrageous extremes and surprised you and have actually germinated?
Mike: Yes. When we put them in the Mars simulation chamber at the Kennedy Space Center I figured the ultraviolet radiation and the extreme temperature and the extreme low pressure for such a long would have a profoundly different effect than it did and in fact the tomato seeds came out with absolutely no ill effects. Basically you can take Heinz tomato seeds and do anything to them and they’re like to old Timex Marlin.
Fred: Keeps going. One last question. Would you like to be part of a space mission some day?
Mike: Yeah, except that I suffer from motion sickness which I understand is a considerable ailment among astronauts. When you see a group of six astronauts up there and only five of them are in the picture, the other one is behind the camera woofing his cookies because of the motion sickness problem. I think I would probably be… although I would love to go to the Moon.
Fred: Have you actually try to find a way in to space?
Mike: No. There is a current search for Canadian astronauts. The next pool of Canadian astronauts, three of my students applied and one of them is still on the short list, so there’s still some hope that this program will generate an astronaut. We’ll certainly generate the training protocols for the horticultural mission specialists that will be participating in Canada’s contribution to exploration in years to come.
Thank you Professor Dixon.
do do do
Fred
To learn more you can go to http://www.ces.uoguelph.ca/index.shtml
That recyclable plant growth medium that Mike was talking about is Agri-LITE™ made by SIR Petro Chemical, which is a green petro chemical company. The thing I find remarkable about this company is that they make a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine that is small enough to go almost anywhere. http://www.oilsponge.com/
Tomatosphere
Tomatosphere is an educational outreach project involving more than 10,000 classrooms across Canada, the United States and a few other countries but mostly in Canada.
In the spring of each year since 2001, classrooms from grades 2 to 10 have been given 2 sets of tomato seeds and a protocol to conduct experiments, on the effects of space and space travel on the growth of plants and seeds.
In the lower grades the experiments are only a few weeks long, just long enough for the seeds to germinate and grow into seedlings. In the higher grades the experiments can go further and involve more science.
The prospect of being involved, first hand, in space experiments is very exciting to kids!
To learn more go to http://www.tomatosphere.org
Tomatosphere is sponsored by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, Heinz Canada, H.J. Heinz Company Foundation, Ontario Centres of Excellence, Stokes Seeds and the University of Guelph.
Indoor Gardener October 2008