A
Eight Dartmouth engineering students have been plotting the ideal garden for future inhabitants of Mars. And theirs is no sci-fi mission. They’re competing Tuesday and Wednesday in NASA’s BIG (Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing) Idea Challenge to create a greenhouse concept that could be used in an actual Mars outpost in the not-too-distant future.
“We’re just really excited to be part of this,” Zoe Rivas, 22, of Twin Falls, Idaho, said in a phone interview last week, prior to leaving for NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. “It was really cool to see it all come together.”
Rivas and her teammates developed their Mars greenhouse plan as part of their capstone project for Dartmouth’s Bachelor of Engineering degree program. It was a bit of a departure for the program, which usually places students in local industries rather than having them plot food systems for a planet millions of miles away.
“This one was too good to pass up,” said Laura Ray, interim dean of Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, who coordinates projects for the capstone course.
The team started its work locally, visiting greenhouses on campus and at Cedar Circle Farm and Long Wind Farm in Thetford.
“We were really determined to get out and see actual greenhouses,” said Rivas, an environmental engineering major. “It was really helpful for us to just see the basics of what a greenhouse is like on Earth before we could start designing one for Mars.”
The team then began planning the design of their greenhouse, fitting it to the “Mars Ice Home,” a concept designed at the Langley center in 2016 that uses an ice shield to protect inhabitants from radiation.
To do so, they had to synthesize multiple threads of research, from determining nutritional requirements for Mars astronauts to plotting the layout of the garden and figuring out how to pack the whole thing for shipment in a 6-by-9-meter box.
With about one third the gravity of Earth, Mars poses health threats, including reduced muscle mass and bone density. To compensate, Mars astronauts will need to exercise frequently. This and other considerations, such as growth times, the Dartmouth team selected eight nutrient dense plants. Most are well-known garden staples: kale, soybeans, sweet potatoes, potatoes, broccoli and strawberries.
A few are less familiar. Along with a dwarf wheat that will grow well in small spaces, the team selected a grass called chufa.
“It grows like a grass but it grows little tubers on the bottom that are really high in fat,” Rivas explained.
The group then designed a hydroponic growing system with a stacked structure to maximize space, as well as multiple subsystems to address considerations such as harvesting schedules and lighting.
“The biggest challenge was juggling all the different pieces and keeping track of it all,” Rivas said.
The team named its dome-shaped design DEMETER (Deployable Enclosed Martian Environment for Technology, Eating, and Recreation), after the Greek goddess of harvest, fertility and agriculture.
In February, the students learned that DEMETER had been selected as a finalist in the competition, along with designs from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Davis and two multi-institutional teams.
The judges told the team they chose its design in part for its practicality. “It may look pretty futuristic … but we really tried to ground our design in feasibility and safety,” Rivas said.
“To be invited to actually present your work at NASA is a delight,” said Ray, who is accompanying the team to Virginia. “I think it was an elegant design, and they covered all the bases. … The video that they developed was very professional too.”
At the competition, Rivas and her team will give a 30-minute presentation and submit a technical paper. The winning design will be announced on Wednesday.
Any of the five teams’ ideas could eventually end up on Mars. The BIG Idea Challenge taps into the academic community to glean ideas for future NASA missions. NASA has told Congress that it wants to send astronauts to Mars by 2033. Independent researchers have cast doubt on the feasibility of that timeframe, putting it closer to the late 2030s.
“I really do think we’re going to Mars,” said Rivas, who dreamed of becoming an astronaut before discovering engineering. “There are many, many people working on getting us there. It’s just a really exciting time to be interested in space and space travel.”
The NASA BIG Idea Challenge can be viewed live at bigidea.nianet.org beginning at 10:15 a.m. on Tuesday.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com and 603-727-3268.