14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main avenues for research in space studies in recent times has been agriculture, which is viewed as a means to reducing the amount of payloads future spacecraft will carry, while at the same time keeping explorers healthy.
Colonizing other worlds is a dream that mankind has been rummaging on for centuries, and now it's finally coming closer to actually happening. As some experts say, we're almost there, we just need to figure some stuff out before we can leave Earth.
Numerous studies are focused on determining how habitable surrounding planets are, as well as if they can be made so in case they are not. Recently-published work proved that some forms of agriculture could endure on Mars, Venus and the Moon.
When it comes to the Red Planet, things are rather straight-forward. Evidence that the planet once had liquid water flowing on its surface has been piling up for years.
“The spur of colonizing new lands is intrinsic in man. Hence expanding our horizon to other worlds must not be judged strange at all. Moving people and producing food there could be necessary in the future,” says Giacomo Certini.
The Italian researcher holds an appointment at the University of Florence Department of Plant, Soil and Environmental Science (DiPSA). He is one of the experts researching how to grow food on other planets.
Doing so will be the key to enduring space exploration. Carrying the food needed for 1 to 2 years of space travel – as needed to get to Mars and back – would take up a lot of space, and would simply be unfeasible, Space reports.
The main aspect of space agriculture is determining whether the target soils that researchers plan to transform using various techniques can actually be defined as such.
“Apart from any philosophical consideration about this matter, definitely assessing that the surface of other planets is soil implies that it 'behaves' as a soil,” Certini reveals.
“The knowledge we accumulated during more than a century of soil science on Earth is available to better investigate the history and the potential of the skin of our planetary neighbors,” he adds.
But making such determinations is not as easy as it seems. On Earth, the concept of soil is an intuitive one, but the situation is not that simple on other planets, were boundaries seem to get very blurry.
“The lack of a unique definition of 'soil,' universally accepted, exhaustive, and (one) that clearly states what is the boundary between soil and non-soil makes it difficult to decide what variables must be taken into account for determining if extraterrestrial surfaces are actually soils,” Certini adds.
However, the issue is currently being analyzed, and a conclusion that will enable future space exploration is not a long way off, space experts believe.