Nitrogen accountancy in space agriculture

Food production and pharmaceutical synthesis are posited as essential biotechnologies for facilitating human exploration beyond Earth. These technologies not only offer critical green space and food agency to astronauts but also promise to minimize mass and volume requirements through scalable, modu...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:NPJ microgravity 2024-09, Vol.10 (1), p.90-13, Article 90
Hauptverfasser: Yates, Kevin, Berliner, Aaron J., Makrygiorgos, Georgios, Kaiyom, Farrah, McNulty, Matthew J., Khan, Imran, Kusuma, Paul, Kinlaw, Claire, Miron, Diogo, Legg, Charles, Wilson, James, Bugbee, Bruce, Mesbah, Ali, Arkin, Adam P., Nandi, Somen, McDonald, Karen A.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Volltext
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Food production and pharmaceutical synthesis are posited as essential biotechnologies for facilitating human exploration beyond Earth. These technologies not only offer critical green space and food agency to astronauts but also promise to minimize mass and volume requirements through scalable, modular agriculture within closed-loop systems, offering an advantage over traditional bring-along strategies. Despite these benefits, the prevalent model for evaluating such systems exhibits significant limitations. It lacks comprehensive inventory and mass balance analyses for crop cultivation and life support, and fails to consider the complexities introduced by cultivating multiple crop varieties, which is crucial for enhancing food diversity and nutritional value. Here we expand space agriculture modeling to account for nitrogen dependence across an array of crops and demonstrate our model with experimental fitting of parameters. By adding nitrogen limitations, an extended model can account for potential interruptions in feedstock supply. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was used to distill key consequential parameters that may be the focus of future experimental efforts.
ISSN:2373-8065
2373-8065
DOI:10.1038/s41526-024-00428-x