The Martian Farm: Bridging The Gap From Regolith To Soil
Imagine you are the lead botanist on a human expedition mission to Mars. Forget the “poop potatoes” [1]from the science fiction novel “The Martian” we’ve got something much cooler, and a lot less messy. You are standing in a high-tech greenhouse in the middle of Jezero Crater, staring at a pile of reddish, sterile dust called regolith. Your mission is to turn that regolith into living soil and feed a crew that is millions of miles from the nearest grocery store.
As exciting as it might be to take a class on a Martian field trip there would be many challenges not to mention a permission slip that felt like signing a home mortgage. So, we do what children do best, we imagine and pretend. We all know children learn best through play[2] and with fantasy being a form of play teams of students have conversations they normally would not. One of the first things that they learn is the logistics are staggering. Shipping two years of food for just four people adds seven tons of weight to a rocket.[3] As humanity examines the prospect of multi-planetary existence, a significant barrier to long-term Martian habitation is not the transit, but the ability to sustain life through localized agriculture. To survive, we must master in situ resource utilization which is basically space-talk for “living off the land”.
Students will be looking at data and images from the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and 2011 Curiosity Rover samples to determine how to transform Martian regolith a sterile, loose layer of toxic weathered rock into a functional soil capable of supporting plant life. The students’ essential questions are, what are the specific chemical, physical, and biological constraints that differentiate Martian regolith? How do we get from regolith to Earth’s fertile soil? What that means is we need to understand the components that make regolith which is nothing more than decomposed rock with no organic compound. As opposed to the soil on earth, which is a living microbiome ready to support the more evident life. By doing this the students will also understand the difference between biotic and abiotic.
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