Why NASA wanted us to discuss agriculture on Mars?
That was the name of the workshop that the NASA invited our CTO — David Brault to, in August 2019.
The Workshop
The event took place at the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, where hundreds of cross-disciplinary group of scientists and engineers with backgrounds in robotics, controlled environment agriculture, systems engineering, and horticulture discussed innovative plant growth technologies, autonomy and robotics to enable space based crop production systems.
“We wanted to explore how autonomy and robotics could contribute to the role that plants will play on future exploration destinations, as well as the role of crop plants as sources of both food and psychological well-being for our astronauts.”
- Ralph Fritsche, Senior project manager for space crop production in support of deep-space exploration at Kennedy.
Two Days of Brainstorming
The workshop enabled brainstorming around topics that are needed in order to develop crop production beyond earth. As a result, participants could learn where cross cutting ideas could best be applied to their own areas of expertise while exploring the potential role space research can play in improving terrestrial agronomy and food security for a growing world population.
This activity should be considered an initial step in bringing together a diverse group of experts to discuss those types of topics.
But, why the need of exploring those topics?
Explore Moon to Mars
The workshop explored different scenarios including everything from the installation of a small plant research chamber on the Lunar Gateway to the development of a greenhouse module on the surface of Mars.
As NASA plans to send astronauts back to the moon in 2024, the project called Explore Moon to Mars aims to develop technology, processes and expertise that could be use to send humans to Mars, in a near future.
‘’We will go with innovative new technologies and systems to explore more locations across the surface than was ever thought possible. This time, when we go to the Moon, we will stay. And then we will use what we learn on the Moon to take the next giant leap — sending astronauts to Mars ”
— NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine
We Are Going
The latest NASA’s campaign called We Are Going reached out to more than 10 millions people online.
The need of continuous development in agriculture beyond earth is more alive than ever. And as a vertical farming equipement company, we are more than ready to contribute to answer tomorrow’s challenges.
It is just the beginning!
About us
At INNO-3B our experts team develop automated vertical farming technology and specific knowledge on controlled-environmenet agriculture.
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