NASA, in collaboration with other leading space agencies, plans toSend First
Astronauts on Mars will need oxygen, water, food and other consumables, and they will need to learn how to store or extract them on Mars, as importing them from Earth will beVery costly.
For this, scientists first developedbiotechnology by which the cyanobacteria Anabaena can only be grown using Martian gases, water and other nutrients, and at low pressure. This greatly facilitates the development of sustainable biological life support systems.
We have shown that cyanobacteria can use gases present in the Martian atmosphere as a source of carbon and nitrogen.Also in Martian conditions, cyanobacteria retained their ability to grow in water that contained only Martian dust.The new discovery could help make long-term missions to Mars even more affordable.
Cyprien Verse, astrobiologist, head of the Laboratory of Applied Space Microbiology at the Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen in Germany
Cyanobacteria have long been considered as candidates for biological life support in spaceflight.All species of bacteria produce oxygen through photosynthesis, and cyanobacteria canfix atmospheric nitrogen in nutrients.
However, the difficulty is that they cannot grow directly in the Martian atmosphere, where the total pressure isless than 1% of Earth's temperature is between 6 and 11 GPa: this is too low for the presence of liquid water, while the partial pressure of nitrogen gas is from 6 to 11 GPa: this is too low for the presence of liquid water.0.2 to 0.3 GPa is not enough for their metabolism.
But recreating an atmosphere like on Earth would betoo expensive: gases would have to be imported. Therefore, the researchers were looking for a middle ground: an atmosphere close to Martian, which allows cyanobacteria to grow well.
So the scientists developed a bioreactor called Atmos, in which cyanobacteria canreproduce and live in artificial atmospheres at low pressure. Atmos hasNine 1 litre glass and steel vessels, each sterile, canheat up and change the pressure as needed.
The authors chose a strain of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria Anabaena sp. PCC 7938 because preliminary tests have shown that it willIt is especially good to use Martian resources, as well as to actively reproduce.
Researchers concluded thatNitrogen-fixing, oxygen-producing cyanobacteria can be grown on Mars at low pressure under controlled conditions using only local ingredients.
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