Recently I went with a couple friends to go see the new Ridley Scott movie, The Martian. Based off the book of the same name, it follows a botanist named Mark Watney who ends up being stranded on mars and has to survive until the next manned rescue mission can come to his aid, four years in the future. In order to survive, Mark needs to create a sustainable food source on a planet where nothing grows. This got me thinking, is it actually possible to cultivate crops on a planet such as mars?

W. Wieger Wamelink seems to think so. Wamelink and his team put together an experiment that they claim is “the first large-scale controlled experiment” to test this theory. They filled pots with 100g of moon soil simulant, 100g of their control variable earth soil, or 50g of mars simulant. They had 840 pots in which they placed seeds of various plants into and were blocked off in a random placement. The results came back to say that the mars simulant had actually performed much better than the moon simulant, and surprisingly slightly better than the earth soil control.

I think this is a pretty solid randomized control experiment which makes the date more reliable to me. The size is definitely large enough to see some actual results and the method of completing the experiment makes sense as well. One thing I remain skeptical about is the use of “soil simulants”. These are recreations developed by NASA so they are coming from a very credible place that knows their extraterrestrial soils. But at the heart of it, these are still simulants, not the actual thing. If we were to accept this conclusion for fact and sent up a team to mars, it would not be good if nothing actually worked when we got up there.

Well, NASA wants to set up an experiment to test plant life on mars and the effects the planet would cause to the plants. Space.com reports on NASA’s plan to launch a mission to mars in the year 2020 in which a rover would carry a self-contained plant growth chamber, similar to that of a greenhouse. The experiment is being conducted to test if the radiation and lesser gravity on Mars would cause harm to the plants or otherwise cause them not to grow. It is mentioned that they do not want to plant on the Martian soil directly in case the earth life were to root itself and begin to change the ecosystem of Mars. Picture

There is another experiment that has already been completed by NASA titled “Veg-01”. National Geographic writes about how NASA scientists grew lettuce on the International Space Station using drip tubes to deliver the water to the roots of the plant. The purpose of the experiment was to test and prepare future colonizers of other planets to have the ability to produce food on planets that do not provide the necessary elements to grow plant life like oxygen. The experiment was a success and you can see the results in this video below from one of the NASA Youtube channels. (Starts around 2:25)

Looking at all of these proposed experiments, the data seems to be pretty solid especially coming from NASA. They are definitely one of the most credible sources when it comes to all things space. But the fact is that the first manned mission to Mars is still years away at this point. Recently we talked in class about not having enough data in studies like soft drinks increasing people’s weight. There are a lot of experiments being made and tested for the future of Mars, but we won’t know just how everything works until we get there ourselves. Everything is very theoretical and how we “think” things should act. I think that is important to look at when looking at this topic. So to me, I think it is possible in some way that plants will be able to be grown on Mars, but at this point none of the data reflects what may actually happen up on Mars. We will have to wait a little longer for those answers.