Human exploration of Mars is still far away. But that doesn’t mean there’s time to waste. Indeed: we are already working hard all over the world to imagine and develop the technologies that will one day allow the first men to set foot on the red planet. Once on the surface, astronauts will need food. And the solution could come from our country: Hort3Space, a hyper-technological garden created by ENEA and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering of the Sapienza University of Rome, is currently being tested in the Armenian desert, to provide fresh vegetables to future explorers of Mars.
Hort3Space is being tested as part of the Amadee-24 mission organized by the Austrian Space Forum, in collaboration with the Armenian Space Agency, to carry out experiments in an extreme environment, the Ararat desert in this case, which simulates environmental conditions of the Martian surface. Until April 5, therefore, a team of 6 highly qualified “astronauts” – including the Italian Simone Paternostro – will work in total isolation (as would happen in an authentic space mission) to test tools, equipment and procedures for future missions of exploration of the red planet, and conduct experiments and projects involving over 200 scientists from 26 countries around the world.
The Italian vegetable garden, in particular, is an innovative multi-level hydroponic cultivation system, fully automated, modular, equipped with specific LED lights and an integrated robotic arm. It allows you to grow vegetables capable of adapting to the most extreme conditions, both on the ground and in space, such as red radish and red cabbage, both rich in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. Hort3Space has been set up inside a grow chamber in a self-supporting inflatable tent, and will allow you to maximize production and reduce resource consumption and crew workload, while increasing waste recovery and recycling .
The Italian research team that developed the high-tech garden has also developed an operating manual, which contains all the procedures necessary to transfer all the information on the installation to the astronauts (in this case their analogues within the simulation). of the platform, the start of activities, maintenance in case of shutdowns and failures. Everything will be coordinated by the Mission Support Center in Vienna, with which there will be a 10 minute delay in communications in order to simulate the distance from Earth to Mars.
The experiments launched on the Made in Italy vegetable garden will serve to verify the feasibility of the entire automated hydroponic cultivation process, to understand the energy consumption of water resources and fertilizers and to study its productivity. With the hope that one day it will be a technology developed in our country that will feed the first explorers of the Martian surface.