A photo from open sources Seed Team (“Seed”) won a chance send watercress aboard an unmanned mission to Mars to explore this plant as a potential food source for the settlers of the Red Planet. The race of colonization of Mars which deployed national agencies and private companies focused mostly on the surface. But if the pioneers still get to Mars, they will have to be fed something, right? For now some students are trying to explore the possibility of growing sustainable food sources on Mars. Seed team was among winners who will have the opportunity to send watercress along with an unmanned mission. Competition launched the nonprofit organization Mars One, which plans to establish human colony on Mars, seeks to identify innovative payload options for pre-mission, scheduled for 2018. Winning team – graduate students from Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands – thinks they are the first germinate seeds on the Red Planet. Their choice of plants fell in appearance Arabidopsis thaliana. These seeds are widely used in scientific research – including in experiments on board International Space Station. “The genes of these plants are good sequenced and very well known in the scientific community, “- adds Teresa Araujo, a member of the Seed team. Updates in the form of photos will be regularly supplied to researchers from Mars, which allow them to monitor seed germination in small cassettes the size of a credit card. Trying to repeat atmospheric conditions Earth, the team will control the temperature, pressure and the oxygen concentration that the seeds will encounter. Araujo believes that team experiments will be valuable to understanding how to grow plants on the Red Planet, and what they offer more than just food. Plants can also adapt for oxygen reproduction.
Colonization of Mars Plants
