Move over, Mark Watney. On Mars, astronauts need to grow more than potatoes for food. And Heather Hava, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, is working on it.
The self-proclaimed “space gardener” has swapped out the fictional Watney for robots; potatoes for strawberries, basil and other greens; and a botanist’s mind for a horticulturist’s. And she added big data.
Hava, named Tuesday as one of this year’s Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winners for college inventors, feels strongly about eating in space. As an undergrad, she spent two weeks living with five other people in the in Utah.
“It was a group of college kids who said ‘Buy macaroni and cheese and ramen.’ I said, ‘No way,’ ” said Hava, who then volunteered to plan every meal and be the crew’s chef. “That (diet) wasn’t going to happen for two weeks.”
The Oregon native, who spent her childhood in Colorado Springs and decided at age 4 that she was going to be an astronaut, said her time in the mock Mars habitat in Utah helped her figure out what exactly she wanted to do in space.
“It was just very eye-opening. I realized how important the food was,” said Hava, who had heard about how important celebrating a holiday can be for astronauts. “They told us to buy cake mix, but there was no oven. … I figured out how to make an applesauce cake in a Crock-Pot. And I made a giant cookie in a skillet. It was so important to our crew. It impacted our morale.”
Homing in on the need to keep astronauts healthy and happy became Hava’s new mission as she researched the design of space habitats.
Plants not only provide a food source but also offer a psychological lift.
“When people get sick, you hear ‘Bring flowers to the hospital.’ It’s not just a nice thing. It really does make a difference in people’s ability to heal,” Hava said. “Being able to have different color flowers, like alpine strawberries, helps (astronauts). While they’re anticipating waiting for the fruit, they have the first stage of joy of waiting for flowers.”
She has developed two robot-inspired devices to help astronauts garden in space. The SmartPot, or SPOT, is a chamber that can semi-autonomously grow fruits and vegetables in any environment. The AgQ is an artificial intelligence platform that uses sensors, wearables and big data to improve crop yields.
Hava, a Master Gardner, also is part of the CU research team that worked on ROGR, or . Inside a space habitat, the remote-controlled robots would handle the menial tasks of gardening — seeding, checking growth, harvesting and recycling nutrients back into the system.
By adding automation, plus remote monitoring, astronauts are free to focus on other critical tasks.
Plus, she added: “Turns out plants are really hard to grow. They don’t just take care of themselves. A lot of people think you just add water and nutrients. If only it were that simple. Engineers are very good at killing plants.”
Growing food on Mars was made fictionally possible for millions of people by author Andy Weir’s 2011 novel, ” ,” and the 2015 Matt Damon movie it inspired. Left behind on Mars, botanist Watney manages to survive more than 549 Martian days by rationing his MREs — Meals Ready to Eat — and growing potatoes by rigging up a using his oxygenator and hydrazine fuel.
Weir made it seem so … believable.
But even Weir has said for the book to work. Radiation exposure probably would have killed Watney, he told Popular Mechanics.
The exploration of growing food on Mars certainly also didn’t start with his book, Weir said.
“I’ve heard of several such projects (like Hava’s). I think they’re awesome, but I think it’s a stretch to say they were inspired by ‘The Martian,’ ” Weir said in an e-mail to The Denver Post. “People have been speculating about and working on how to grow crops in Martian soil for a long time.”
Hava said one of the scenes in the movie she most enjoyed was when Watney saw his first potato plants sprout.
“You could see the psychological perspective of having those plants. They were his connection back to Earth — the only living thing there,” she said. “And I saw his expression of hope. He found life was possible because he could potentially grow potatoes to keep life sustained.”
CU’s aerospace department is one of a few in the U.S. that offer an emphasis in bioastronautics, or the study and support of life in space.
“It really hasn’t been mainstream,” said Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor in CU’s computer science and engineering department who works with Hava. “(Hava’s) whole idea is to offload some of the labor that growing requires while maximizing the psychological benefit. That makes it important both for space applications and immediate (commercial) applications.”
CU’s ROGR project was and the National Space Grant Foundation for the 2013 X-Hab competition, or the Exploration Habitat Academic Innovation Challenge. The Boulder team went on to develop a system where humans on Earth could remotely control in space to help feed deep-space travelers.
The school also has won X-Hab awards every year since — , and .
Other projects, including an automated greenhouse that would be sent to Mars ahead of humans, are still in development. Next steps include testing in environments similar to a Mars mission — Antarctica is a goal. Hava has also started and to offer commercial solutions to people living in areas where gardening is difficult and food is scarce.
The research is not cheap, and Hava said she’s grateful for the $15,000 Lemelson-MIT award, which is named for prolific American inventor Jerome H. Lemelson.
Gardening on Mars isn’t that far away, and she hopes to spread the word that research on sustainability can be just as crucial as investing in propulsion technology.
“This is the cornerstone of what will make it possible for us to leave our home planet and move out to the solar system and live on another celestial system,” Hava said. “That has to be the goal if the human race is going to make it in the long term.”
Tamara Chuang: tchuang@denverpost.com or visit dpo.st/tamara
