8 Ways We're Getting Ready To Go To Mars
3. Growing Food
Astronauts are people and people have gotta eat.
It's all very well sending them up to the ISS with some freeze-dried curry and recycled water, but living on Mars for any length of time would require us to figure out how to grow and propagate our own food. The concern was that food grown in Martian soil might be dangerous or contain toxic levels of metals such as aluminium and copper.
Luckily, however, researchers in the Netherlands have been experimenting with growing crops under Martian conditions here on earth, using what we know about the soil composition on the red planet.
They have so far managed to grow radish, pea, rye and tomato crops and the levels of heavy metals have been promising. They'll soon be moving on to green beans, rocket and spinach and potatoes, so it looks like Martian astronauts would have a better diet than most Earthlings,
Although the amounts of heavy metals in the Martian crops were at safe levels here on earth, one problem that those astronauts could potentially face is how Mars' lower gravity will affect their uptake. But if you want to help them figure it out, the project is being crowdfunded here.