This native Australian plant might not look like much. In fact, you might have seen it
at your local pond. But what if I told you these floating fronds could end up on a rocket to Mars?
Right now, the world is a little bit obsessed with Mars. I mean,
in 2017, the US president at the time literally signed a presidential order,
telling NASA to get people on the Red Planet by the 2030s.
We will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars.
It will be the longest mission we've ever been on, around three years at a bare minimum,
and while it's going to present a bunch of technological challenges, one of the biggest is
what are we going to eat?
We’re proposing a toast just because we're in space, and we can.
Astronauts don't exactly starve on missions at the moment, eating anything from freeze dried
macaroni to pizza, and occasionally resupply vehicles will bring the International Space
Station fresh fruit and vegetables. But the ISS is only 400 kilometres away, Mars is 100 million,
so resupply is near on impossible. And when the cost to send just one kilogram into space is
$25,000 stocking a ship with more than 1000 days' worth of food is not exactly doable. Luckily,
researchers from across Australia are working on a solution. Come with me.
I should switch this off
G’day Jenny, how are you going?
I’m good thanks, how are you?
Good thank you, now what are we doing here?
So this is duckweed. It's a really cool little plant, you see it growing on the surface of
water sometimes. You walk past a river or pond and it's very green. People think it might be
an algae or something. It's quite often duckweed, which is a plant that's related
more to wheat and barley and we think this is going to be a food for astronauts in space.
Gotcha, and why are you interested in it, why, why are you researching it?
It's a really interesting plant to work with. It's also super nutritious, so we can eat it
as is. It's really high in protein, it's got a lot of vitamins in it, so it's almost a complete meal.
There's a few criteria when it comes to picking the best food to take on a trip to space. One,
it has to be healthy and nutritious, freeze-dried meals might be good for short missions,
but nutrients degrade over a long period of time. So they're no good. Two, they can't
take up too much space or produce much waste. Again, that means pre-packaged meals are out of
the question. And three, they need to be quick to grow and ready to eat. Astronauts have grown
things like lettuce and chillies on the ISS. But these things take a bit of time to grow. Duckweed
is always ready to eat. In fact, it doubles every 48 hours, so you can just keep eating
it and eating it and it's going to keep growing and growing. I'm going to keep this container
here for the next few days and we'll see how quickly and how much actually grows. Stay tuned.
So you say it's a meal. These things are tiny, I don't think I'd be particularly
satisfied just with that. So how are you planning to satisfy astronauts needs?
It's a, it's a really good point. They are very tiny, but they grow really, really fast. So even
if you only had like a metre growing space, you could have maybe stack it 15 trays high to the
ceiling so you could grow quite a lot. And we freely admit not everyone wants to just eat kind
of green goo for food. So one of the projects we work in a large group of scientists is we
work with food scientists who think about how we can process this into something that tastes good.
While duckweed is extremely high in protein and is packed with plenty of nutrients there are still
room for improvements. Most plants don't produce vitamin D, so Jenny's lab is looking at ways to
genetically engineer species of duckweed to solve this problem. A lot of astronauts also suffer
something called menu fatigue, where they get sick of eating the same types of meals, so they
just don't eat at all. It can cause astronauts to lose weight become nutrient deficient and overall
morale on missions to drop significantly. The most commonly requested food on the ISS is a nice
crisp apple. As a solution Jenny is looking into whether she can introduce new genes into duckweed,
that code for different flavours of food to provide a bit of variety in the menu.
So we're really just at the beginning, honestly. So really, it's about how do
we go from producing a small amount of this to producing something that really
is a foodstuff that someone could rely on in a really stressful and remote situation.
We see it as like a little green factory for making medicines, building materials,
and all sorts of things. So we have students who are assigned to work on projects like that.
We've been talking a lot about it being a great food. So can we go and eat some?
We can absolutely go and try some, not here in the lab, but we can go to the greenhouse.
Let’s do it, lab coats off?
Lab coats off, thank you.
The greenhouse!
The greenhouse.
Here we are.
So this is where we're growing some of the plants that are more for human
consumption outside the lab, and you can see it's a little bit less high tech here.
A little bit less high tech but.
Buckets! This is kind of getting closer to how we might grow at larger scale for
human consumption, not necessarily buckets, it might be a bit fancier.
Gotcha. Now, you said you're making here you're making them for human
consumption. That water’s brown...all of this water’s pretty brown, so...
I promise you I won't give you the brown water. So...it's brown just because what
we're using is a nutrient solution. So what we've actually got down here for
you, you’ll be pleased to know is some...some of our duckweed but in very clean water.
Lunchtime!
Lunchtime! So feeling brave?
Yeah! Get a little bit here.
Very brave of him.
What am I going to, what’s it going to taste like do you reckon?
Well let me know, so they can all taste, we’ve had lots of different feedback.
It tastes like a lot of nothing.
Perfect and that's actually a really good answer. It's kind of what we're looking for.
I got it right!
Yeah, no, no, because we want something that's
very neutral that we can then use to add and layer of flavour that tastes great.
I still do have some leftovers from lunch. Do you want them back or...?
No no, I think we’re all good! Oh, okay.
I feel like an astronaut now!
Excellent!