Plant Cultivated in Gardens Robotic Astronaut for Food Supply

Students from the University of Colorado is currently developing a robotic system that is destined garden as a provider of food ingredients such as vegetables and fruits for the astronauts in space missions running long distances such as to Mars.

Project led by Professor Joe Tanoe (former astronaut who is now a teacher), Nikolaus Correll (Professor of computer science and had worked at MIT), and Dave Klaus (biologist), executed with a grant worth $ 40 thousand.

If the project is completed, it will produce a food system that is capable of supporting life biogeneratif simultaneously include air purifying, filtering water and produce food for consumption. In brief, the garden itself has four phases, namely breeding farms, monitoring plant growth, harvesting, and processing of crop residues to recycle nutrients and return to an earlier stage.

Currently the research team has prepared a prototype of the orchard. This project is one of the winners of the competition “The X-Hab Academic Innovation Challenge” held NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation to several universities in the United States in order to help prepare NASA for space exploration systems.