The majority holding of fresh produce. But it is not always easy to grow vegetables themselves.
The German center for air and space DLR, will try with the cultivation of tomatoes in a satellite, as Sunday evening was sent.
the Satellite Eu:CROPIS will be sent in 600 km orbit above Earth. It writes the DR.
Inside the satellite are two greenhouses. The satellite weighs 250 pounds, and here the germans cultivate cosmic tomatoes.
Conditions in the satellite must correspond to the conditions on the Moon and Mars, if one day we should come to establish ourselves up there.
The within the 250 kilogram heavy satellite was sent off Photo: DLR
When you are 600 kilometers up in the Earth’s atmosphere, there is not very much oxygen or nutrients to the plants.
Why should tomatplanterne have help from a colony of micro-organisms to transform syntestisk urine for fertilizer, and a particular alga of the genus Euglena. It should help to produce oxygen and protect the drivhusmiljøet from excessive amounts of ammonia from the artificial urine.
But it is not enough. There also needs solar energy to keep plants alive. Here tomatplanterne settle with the LED lights, and at the same time, a pressure tank to create an atmosphere, as we know on Earth.
the Researchers can follow via 16 cameras. The system has already been tested.
– It’s crazy impressive what the biologists have made. It is a very, very closed system. Yet they’ve managed to make it stable, says Jakob Fromm Pedersen, who today is an engineer in the Terma, but until 2017, was employed in DLR, where he worked on the Eu:CROPIS-project.
the tomato plants to grow in space, using, among other things syntestisk urine and LED lights Photo credit: DLR
the Purpose of this mission is to see if it can be possible in the future to grow vegetables in space. So astronauts can have access to fresh food, for example, a moon base.
the First half of the time to the satellite to simulate the Moon’s gravity and then power on.
Greenhouse-the satellite is sent from the u.s. military spaceport Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket. It is also from here that Nasa’s Insight probe, on Monday evening landed on Mars, is launched, writes DR.
