Plants in Space AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE

Wednesday 21 September, 2016 at The Shine Dome Canberra.

IF YOU WERE INSPIRED by the resourcefulness of botanist-come-astronaut Mark Watney in Andy Weir’s The Martian, you’ll want to attend this talk.

Plants are not just a nostalgic gimmick in space. Sure, they may brighten up the rather technical decor of any space station. But they also have the potential to provide fresh food, remove carbon dioxide and produce oxygen for astronauts. And over the past 30 years, NASA has been working hard to make that happen.

And you can hear about the exciting developments direct from expert speakers – NASA scientists Gioia Massa and Ray Wheeler, and Purdue University’s Cary Mitchell.

Massa works on food production for the International Space Station, heading a group that studies fertiliser and light impacts on nutrition and flavour on crops grown in space. She hopes her work with plants will one day improve the quality of life for Mars habitat residents.

Wheeler leads Advanced Life Support research at NASA’S Kennedy Space Centre. During his postdoctoral research, he studied potato cultivation for life support in space. If you’re curious: potatoes are a good candidate, Wheeler says, as they can produce twice the amount of food as other seed crops, given an equivalent amount of light. They also require minimal processing and, if worst comes to worst, can be eaten raw.

Mitchell has been director of two NASA research centres in bioregenerative and advanced life support and was program scientist for the Gravitational Biology and Ecology program at the Ames Research Centre. NASA research on crops, he says, has not only made advances for food production in space – it’s also taught us about cultivation on Earth.