Teams face year of inner space
and cucumbers.
The harvest will be part of their food. They also will experiment with growing mealworms to consume as a source of protein.
Liu Hui, one of the volunteers and a doctoral student in biomedicine at Beihang University, said before entering the lab on Wednesday that their main tasks are to grow plants, to observe inner biology within the lab, to record their own metabolism and to test the equipment.
She noted that in the lab they can use a computer, make phone calls or conduct video chats with their families and do physical exercise with the proper equipment.
Professor Liu Hong, director of the Research Center of Space Life Science and Life Support Technology, who heads the project, said astronauts would carry all their necessities with them in short- or mediumlength space journeys, such as China’s Shenzhou manned missions that last at most one month.
For space stations, cargo spaceships would be used to transport supplies. However, longer-lasting missions in the future, such as constructing a lunar station or manned expeditions to Mars, will require the station or spacecraft itself to be self-sustaining, which mean they must carry physical and chemical instruments that can generate the necessities of life.
“Therefore, such experiments will check whether our bioregenerative life-support system can work well and explore how astronauts can resolve possible psychological problems in a sealed environment for a long time,” Liu Hong said, adding the experiment’s data and findings also will be useful in manned deep-sea exploration programs.
The professor noted that Lunar Palace 365 is the world’s first experiment to examine the recyclable applications of animals and microbes in the space environment.
The Lunar Palace 1 housed a three-person, 105-day airtight experiment in 2014.