Speaker
Description
Food plays a crucial role in human space exploration. A balanced and nutritious diet for astronauts is essential for maintaining their physical and mental health and performance during space missions. However, bringing food to space presents several challenges related to food quality and variousness, as well as the high cost and logistical difficulties of transporting supplies from Earth.
Indoor farming (IF) is a technique that involves growing crops using aeroponic or hydroponic nutrition, artificial lighting, and climate-controlled environments. While this technology has already been implemented on Earth, it has also sparked interest in its potential for space exploration, especially for the Moon or Mars permanent bases. IF is essential for ensuring the human capability of steadily colonizing external planets since it can mitigate many of the needs of earth-coming supplies and fresh, calorie and vitamin-rich food.
Space farming (SF), meaning IF for space applications, presents several challenges on plant physiology and technological levels. For instance, it faces crop production in diverse scenarios and needs, such as the importance of fastening crop production while ensuring high-quality food and using a minimum amount of resources.
Light radiation plays a pivotal role in this complex scenario since it can affect plant development at different levels. As well established, crops maximize energy uptake from photons in the red and blue parts of the visible spectrum. However, other radiations are important in driving plant metabolism.
Here, we propose to examine strawberries' responses to various spectra, assessing their effect on growth, flowering time, fruit productivity and secondary metabolism induction.
Our finding reveals that adequate control of the light spectrum makes it possible to time the flowering time and induce strawberries to accumulate important molecules for human health.
These results provide a solid basis for SF as they can be used to minimize energy costs per total fruit production and regulate the time required for production. In addition, the stimulation of secondary metabolism can lead to the accumulation of substances important for the human diet, ultimately facilitating living in extraterrestrial environments.