On this Student Spotlight: Can we grow food on Mars?
Robert Cheatham, PhD student in chemical engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology, digs into the regolith to find out.
Robert Cheatham is a PhD student and researcher pursuing a doctoral degree in chemical engineering at Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech) in Melbourne, Florida. An award-winning researcher, Cheatham earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering with a minor in nanotechnology and nanoscience from Florida Tech, where he served as president of the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He won best in show at the 2024 Northrup Grumman Showcase for his work on methanol conversion from cruise ship food waste, earned first place for his research in advanced chemically activated biochar, and was selected as the outstanding student of the year by Florida Tech’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.
Growing Food on Mars
The future of space exploration calls for colonizing Mars in the decades ahead. The top five commodities required for human settlement there are energy, oxygen, construction materials, water, and food. Science confirms that the first four are abundant in economically viable concentrations and in forms that can likely be extracted, obtained or created on Mars.
Food, however, remains the biggest challenge on the list. Given the significant payload weight associated with transporting food, colonists will need to grow much of what they will eat to survive.
The challenge is that the Martian regolith—the “soil” that exists there, as it stands alone with its poor water retention and low carbon content, is not the greatest “soil” for growing much of anything.
Regolith is primarily a bunch of metals. It’s basically all rust, much like the stuff that comes off of our shovels and other tools after they’ve been sitting in the tool shed for a few months.
And, just as we cannot send tons of food into space, we cannot ship tons of dirt to Mars for farming purposes. So we will need to work with the regolith, to enrich it and improve it, to grow crops to feed space colonists.
My research explores how we can modify the regolith to make something new that can be used for agriculture–and that will also hold and retain water, which will be an available yet precious commodity on Mars. We have confirmed that, by creating a composite substance by incorporating biochar, an activated carbon similar to charcoal produced from burning biomass, and mixing it with regolith, we can accomplish both.
The process creates a brand-new substance using heat, energy, and waste in which we can grow food.
It’s renewable and reusable.
And it’s not going to run out on Mars.
Read More:
[ScienceDirect] – Co-activation of Martian regolith and hydrochar for enhanced water retention and water holding capacity
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