Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Science You’ve Enabled

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

The Planetary Society has just announced the latest awards in its Science and Technology Enabled by the Public (STEP) Grant program. With regular host Sarah Al-Ahmed on vacation, Mat Kaplan returns to introduce the principal investigator for a project that will prepare us to grow food on the Moon and Mars. Another PI and his team plan to analyze extreme life in super salty lakes. Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts heads the STEP Grant program. He’ll give us an overview, and a quick look at the satisfying success of the previous projects. Stick around as Mat joins Bruce for this week’s What’s Up. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-step-grant-principal-investigatorsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learning to farm on Mars and looking for life in the saltiest of waters, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, I'm Matt Kaplan, Senior Communications Advisor at the Planetary Society. It's great to be back at the Plan Red microphone while Sarah is on vacation. She'll be back next week with more of this human adventure across our solar system and beyond. The Planetary Society has just announced the two projects that have been awarded our latest STEP grants. That's science and technology enabled by the public. In other words, by you, if you're one of our members or donors. Stick around as we meet the principal investigators for these exciting efforts. The Society's chief scientist, Bruce Betts, will provide a brief overview of the program in moments.

I wonder if he'll remember me. I mean, it was more than two decades that we brought you What's Up, and we'll continue that tradition today. It all begins with selected headlines from The Down Lake, our free weekly newsletter. The May 26 edition is topped by a stunning image of what may be sand dunes on Pluto. That's if you can call tiny particles of frozen methane sand. Check out the close-up captured by New Horizons when it whizzed by in 2015. Check out the close-up captured by New Horizons when it whizzed by in 2015. Drop down a bit closer to the Sun and you'll find a polar storm on Uranus.

The data were collected over several years by the giant dishes of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, which is an awfully impressive piece of radio astronomy in anyone's book. This discovery puts Uranus right in step with our solar system's other big planets that host polar cyclones. Move over, SpaceX. NASA has picked the team led by Blue Origin as the second provider of a lander that will put humans back on the moon. The Blue Moon lander is expected to be part of the Artemis V mission. We link to the NASA release and a very cool artist concept at planetary.org slash downlink. There's something else I have to mention. Scroll a bit farther down in the May 26 newsletter and you'll see a really beautiful painting of Pluto's big companion Charon.

Here's what makes this work even more interesting. The artist's name companion, Charon. Here's what makes this work even more interesting. The artist's name is Ken Charon. That's right, C-H-A-R-O-N. How could he resist? Hey, Bruce, we got you up front here to talk a little bit more about the Step Grants. And as I've told everybody, we're going to be meeting the two principal investigators in moments. But since you run this program, I thought you might want to remind us a little bit of, you know, why this is so important to us and why we're so glad that it's been successful. I'm so impressed by these two projects. And I'm very happy with it. And it is a relatively new program we just ran. This is now just the second round of STEP grant winners. And basically, we created the STEP grant program to help fill out our science and technology portfolio of things that we support, niches that we can fill that our members as a group can support and make a difference in science and technology developments. But in this case, we are able to cast the net far and wide and invite proposals through an

open international competition and therefore find things that we may not have otherwise found, which has been true. And we're very happy with the first two projects that we've talked about on the radio podcast before. Now, we're very excited about these two new winners. So, I'm glad you've talked to them and we'll hear about their projects. What was the process? How did these two rise to the top? Well, I have a dark board. No, no.

With StepGrants, we invite pre-proposals first. So people submit a couple pages with backup information and we assess those using experts from our organization. Those anyone can submit. And then we invite full proposals from. They were all excellent. Wish we could have funded all of them. But these two rose to the top after being evaluated by numerous scientists and engineers, experts in the field, as well as the Planetary Society as a whole to figure out where we could make a difference. You said this is the second round, so we don't have a lot to go on. But I know that you've been staying in touch with our first round winners. What's the latest on those? Sure. And I'll also mention Planetary Society has done crowdfunding support of science and technology since long before the word crowdsourcing, crowdfunding was invented. Going back to the beginning of the organization, but now we're opening it up and making it more of this

competitive open process. And out of the first round, we had a proposal from UCLA by Jean-Luc Margot, led by him, that has been making a lot of progress on the field of SETI, radio SETI, so search for extraterrestrial intelligence, taking signals from Green Bank Telescope. for extraterrestrial intelligence, taking signals from Green Bank telescope. What's interesting about where our piece fit in was we funded part of the development of the public involvement as citizen scientists. So one of the hardest things when you're looking for signals from aliens is to get rid of all the signals from we human aliens that are putting out a bunch of radio interference, at least it's interference if you're trying to get rid of it. You can actually go online and you can find out on

our website how to do so if you want to participate in the project and help identify the patterns that go along with the human-caused interference. And basically, that's being used to train artificial intelligence processing that will be able to make the whole process more efficient and search through more signals. So that's one over in SETI land and then over in planetary defense defending the earth from asteroid impact we funded a group in Serbia the University of Belgrade who has been making great progress doing theoretical studies of details of extracting physical properties of asteroids, near-Earth asteroids, by using a thing called the Yarkovsky effect. where if that gets measured, that tweaks the orbit of the asteroid, and they're able to then deduce something about the asteroid,

eventually its density, its surface properties. Anyway, you can learn more on our website where we'll get more out there. We'll interview them again one of these days, but both projects have been doing great over the last year or so since they were funded. Makes me proud. I'm a member, and that's how this stuff is happening with the support from all of us members and donors. And thank you for managing this for us.

Thank you. I'm proud and happy to do so and grateful to all the members and supporters who get involved in supporting this and grateful to all the proposers. And, you know, I wish we could fund more and hopefully we'll be able to in the future. We'll run another one of these competitions in another couple of years or so. And meanwhile, we have another competition coming out at the end of June. We'll be telling you about our newest round of Shoemaker-Neo grant winners who do planetary defense upgrade observatories, but that's for another show. Another very successful program though.

All right. You'll be back when we get to what's up toward the end of this week's show, but we can now meet Jacob Buffo out of Dartmouth College and hear about the first of these two 2023 STEP grant awards. Jacob, great to see you again. Congratulations on being one of our brand new STEP Grant winners. It's great to see you and how wonderful it is to be able to congratulate you on this. Yeah, thanks so much. It's great to be back. We're super excited and pretty humbled to get the opportunity to work with the Planetary Society and with the Step Grant program. We are thrilled to have such a great project to support yours along with the

one from Andrew Palmer. I read the proposal. What it really made me want to do is go with you when you head to those weird lakes in British Columbia. But I was surprised to read in the proposal that there has been so little study of these so-called hypersaline lakes, these bodies of water that are often many times as salty as our oceans, right? Especially as we find super salty water, or at least we suspect it all around our solar system. Yeah, yeah, they're pretty inconspicuous, it kind of seems. A lot of them aren't very, very big. They'll be like an acre or two. Some of them might be five, six, seven acres. But I kind of got introduced to them by Alex Ponifrax, who's one of the co-I's on the project. I got to go up there in 2019 as a graduate student to these lakes. But they're super exciting systems. And like you said, they're really salty.

And one of the other exciting things is kind of the unique geology of the region up there is such that kind of all of these different chemicals and salts that kind of get leached out of the rocks by groundwater and precipitation and runoff and stuff collecting these basins, but they're not the salts that we think about, these sodium chloride salts that are in our ocean. They're these magnesium sulfate systems and sodium carbonate systems. And so we think that's really exciting because some of those compositions have been seen on Mars and these ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus. So we kind of want to go up there and use these as our little planetary laboratory. You can kind of drive 10 or 15 kilometers from one side to the next and get kind of a totally different flavor of lake to work in, which is really exciting. I think it's terrific also that

these very exotic lakes are relatively close to civilization. It's not going to be that difficult for you to reach them. It's not like you have to go up into the high Andes or something. Absolutely. And that's another reason why we chose to go there. It's really easy to get to them. We fly into Vancouver and we just drive up into the interior and can stay at a hotel every night instead of camping on the ice like they do in Antarctica or, you know, Northern Canada or something. So they're pretty accessible and it's great when we're up there. All the folks in town kind of know us now and, oh, we're back for the lakes and they'll have suggestions for which lakes to go to. So we also feel kind of rapport with the community up there, which is really exciting, too.

That's great. I didn't realize that it was more of a community. What really amounts to an analog for some of these other places around the solar system, where you're probably not going to find friendly neighbors directly to the best lake. Right. Do we know that there is already stuff that has learned how to live in these pretty extreme environments? Yeah. So there's a few folks on our team that are kind of just specialists in the biology side of things. And one of the big

reasons that we go up there is to one, not just figure out what these lakes look like, especially from the remote sensing perspective. If you're looking at them with satellites or drones or something like that, that's kind of the way we do planetary science a lot of times, right? This is the top-down approach that you talked about, this top-down approach in the proposal, which is what you're going to emulate or use up there. Yeah, absolutely. We go through this, like you said, the top-down approach where we go from a probe to an orbiter to a lander to a rover, and that's how we typically

do planetary exploration. But we want to be able to optimize that for selecting sites, whether it's for looking for life or utilizing resources for future crewed missions or something like that. We want to be able to do that efficiently. So we're trying to simulate that in these environments as a dry run to practice and improve that approach so we can optimize that for future missions like Europa Clipper or Juno that just got sent out or future Mars stuff as we send more and more things there. We want to make our selections so that we're not wasting money or energy or activity. And we do that on Earth, right?

Like when I'm planning a field season up there, I go to Google Earth and I'm like, oh, look, there's a lake just over this ridge. Maybe we should go check it out. But if we go and it's not exciting, then all we did was waste a few hours and a little bit of energy walking up over the ridge, where if you make that same mistake on Mars, you've maybe wasted a little bit more than just a bit of a hike. Yeah, especially if your rover took a month to get to that spot that turns out to not be interesting. Does this have relevance? I mean, sure, Mars, we hope someday Enceladus Europa,

where we might find life as we know it, in quotes. Would this have relevance maybe for more exotic places like Titan and the Dragonfly mission? Like you said, it's a more exotic system. The farther you go out in the solar system, it seems the weirder things get. Titan has all of these different hydrocarbons and stuff like that, but we're still hoping that there could be some direct relation. I mean, some of the big things is in the winter, these lakes freeze over. So they have ice covers and in the ice gets trapped small amounts of biology and small amounts of chemistry and information about what's underneath. When we look at this from our top down from the sky, our drones, our spectra and stuff like that. Can we understand what's underneath the ice in

these lakes? Can we predict the composition or how biologically rich it is by what we see in the ice? Hopefully we can extend that to more complex systems as far as just really being able to link what we see at the surfaces to what's underneath to make good predictions for where we should go, what places we should target. How many trips are you and your team going to make up there? And are you going to go at different times of year? Yeah, the plan is to be able to do four trips. There'll be two in the dry season and then two in the winter. So one of the kind of exciting things about this place, it sits right in between the Canadian Rockies and the Coast Mountains. It's this high plateau area. And so in the summer, it gets extremely hot. It'll be

40 degrees Celsius, 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And you have this warm desiccating system where you're evaporating all of your water out and you have these salt pans. And so it's this extreme, you know, maybe not the heat part, but at least the dryness part of a dry Mars system. And then in the winter, after you've had some snowfall and rain in the fall, in the winter, it gets extremely cold, negative 40, negative 50 sometimes up there. So you kind of have this other extreme. So we like it because there's a lot of exposure for the biology and for the geochemistry to kind of this wide spectrum of temperatures and dryness and all this stuff. So we really like to go and look at these extremophiles that live in these systems and just how these systems behave. So yeah, we'll go up two years, once in the warm

part, once in the winter part. The reason for this is in this top-down approach, using the first year as kind of our training data set, where we'll go up and we'll get all this information, both boots on the ground, in situ, grabbing all our samples and stuff, and then comparing that to aerial and orbital scale imaging and information to kind of link those remote sensing measurements to what we're actually getting in the ground. And then the next year will kind of be this simulated mission. So we want to go to some lakes that we've never been to before,

and we'll basically use those remote images to predict what we think we'll see in these environments and let that drive our sampling strategy. And then we'll go up there in that second year and see how well we did, right? Or if we've really bungled it up. That's a really exciting part of this project that you will be doing in this second year, that simulated mission, hopefully not having to wear bulky spacesuits as you do it,

to go that far with the simulation. Who will actually make the trip with you? And you want to say something about your co-investigators? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the other really special parts about the STEP grant opportunity here is that typically with some of these bigger NASA and NSF grants, the teams are typically made up of professors, researchers, stuff like that. And while you might have graduate students or younger folks working on these projects,

they aren't necessarily writing these proposals and leading these research components. Whereas our team is basically half of the co-eyes. There's going to be seven people on the team in total. Half of the co-eyes are graduate students or have just recently received their PhD. So there's Emma Brown from Arizona State. She's a graduate student there who does geochemistry in extreme environments. Emmy Hughes is at Georgia Tech. She's also a graduate student and has been going up with me to do spectroscopy in these systems.

She focuses on the salts in these environments and their applicability to Mars. Floyd Nichols just got his PhD from Northwestern, and he's a biogeochemist. He's been working at these lakes as well, so he kind of knows his way around them and looking at these biological markers that get left in these systems. So that's kind of a whole side that has an opportunity to drive this whole project. They help write the proposal. They'll be leading the sampling for their specialties in this environment. And then there's Alexander Pontefract, who was the person who took me up there the first time. She's a research scientist at Georgetown. And then there's Mitch Barklage, who will do this subsurface imaging stuff. He'll

use this electromagnetic induction technique to basically look at the groundwater flow underneath these lakes, which is really exciting for how would we figure out where the water is on Mars. And then Maggie Osborne, who's also at Northwestern and is a biogeochemist as well. Very diverse team. And what a wonderful opportunity for some of these younger researchers. Great experience early in their careers. We couldn't do the project without them. I mean, they're truly leading their own subsections. They're specialists in those fields. So they're kind of holding the reins for that. And I'm just super thankful that they agreed to be part of it and, you know, work together on this. It is a

really like, takes a village project just because planetary science is so diverse. So to do this comprehensive dataset gathering for these lakes, I could absolutely not do it on my own. So it's really great to have this community of folks that's willing to go up and work together, work at these lakes, characterize these lakes and do this mission, simulated mission approach. So what is the, what is the STEP grant going to support? Because I know it's, you know, we're very proud of it and we're a small organization. But our funds, one of the priorities in this grant program was to leverage existing resources. Is that happening in your case? spend at our institutions doing our day-to-day life and things. And so a lot of these folks have grants already or the graduate students are working on different projects, but all of their work is very tangential to what we want to do at these lake systems. But those specific projects

might not have dedicated funding to go and work at these lakes just because it's working on a slightly different, a kind of a tangential, a similar problem. So, you know, we have all these laboratories and equipment and things that are just ideal for going and exploring and working at these lakes, but we don't necessarily have the funding built in all the time just to go and do these data grabs and the in the field stuff. So there's a bunch of different NASA proposals that I work on and that a lot of the COIs work on that's doing similar things for maybe slightly different systems. Emma, I know, works in Yellowstone on some extreme systems.

You know, people are all over doing all these different things, but we don't have that funding as a group, this kind of island of misfit toys of folks. We don't have that funding to get together and all go up and go to Canada at the same time to work as this conglomerate team. So the STEP grant has given us the opportunity for everybody to come up together and do these big field seasons together to get all this data and information. That's great. Exactly, of course, what we were after with the STEP grants. I got to come back to biology for a second before we wrap up. I've said before on Planetary Radio that

outside of quite a few mammals, including, you know, like my family, my favorite organisms on Earth are the pupfish that live seasonally in the waters that are found in Death Valley. The biology in these hypersaline lakes, are we talking just tiny microorganisms or is there any, you know, bigger multicellular stuff that swims around up there now and then? Typically, we're most interested in the little guys, the little bacterial small scale stuff, but there's actually also a ton of brine shrimp in many of these lakes. So you'll go up and they have a really unique kind of cellular structure, these lakes. So if you think of like this big, wide salt flat, they're usually not very deep. They're usually, I don't know, 10 to 50 centimeters thick, pretty shallow lakes. But

they form this really weird pattern ground where you have these kind of sub pools within the lake. They're really, really cool. And you'll like walk up to one of these pools and it'll just be full of brine shrimp swimming around. And you're kind of like, how is this even possible for, yeah, this organism that's a bit bigger to be in these systems that are completely saturated. A lot of times the floors of these lakes have salts on them because the liquid has gotten so concentrated that the salt can't dissolve anymore. It just crashes out. So these are like, you know, 20 to 30% salt in the solution. And these little shrimp are just swimming around and they're super happy. So, you know, looking at the chemistries of these systems to figure out what is

limited in these environments to life is just a, you know, another aspect of that. Like why is magnesium sulfate, maybe not as toxic as sodium sulfate or something like that and picking apart what really controls habitability here so that we can extend that to other systems. And how can we measure that remotely and link that to what we're seeing in these brines or underneath these pools? This is so cool. I was only half joking when I said I want to join you up there. I mean, I saw the hotel is not very expensive. And, you know, I suppose I could drive to Vancouver. But I mean, promise not to step in anybody's research or on the brine shrimp. I would love to think I could make it up there someday and watch the work as it goes on. I am

also sure that when this work is farther along, and you have some things to report back on that Sarah or maybe I will want to bring you back on the show if that's okay. Yeah, absolutely. Have a great time up there. Stay safe and can't wait to hear the results of your STEP grant. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me on. Jacob Buffo is a research scientist at Dartmouth College and the principal investigator for one of the Planetary Society's 2023 STEP grant-funded projects. After the break, our other PI, Andrew Palmer, will tell us how he'll use his STEP grant to learn how we'll grow crops on the Moon and the Red Planet. This is Planetary Radio. Ready to level up your space game? Hi, I'm Amber, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society,

and we are launching our brand new digital member community. This is a place that's built exclusively for Planetary Society members. Here you can connect with fellow members from around the world, join live events you won't get anywhere else, and delve deeper into the wonders of our cosmos and the missions that explore them. It's all about putting the society in the planetary society. If you're not yet a member, now's the time to join at planetary.org forward slash join. I'll see you on the digital frontier.

A trip to Mars and back is likely to take two years or even more. Keeping astronauts healthy, fit and happy on that long journey is turning out to be at least as big a challenge as building the spaceships that will get them there and back. Radiation, microgravity, isolation, and food. Someday, when humans are living on Mars, where their next meal will come from, and the next, and the next, is a question we're not yet ready to answer. Andrew Palmer's STEP grant project may become a big step toward a solution, or more likely, solutions. Andrew is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology. His impressive project is titled Evaluation of Food Production Systems for Lunar and Martian Agriculture.

He and one of his collaborators recently joined me for an online conversation. Andrew or Drew, which is, I guess, how you prefer to go by. Thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. And congratulations on being one of our two STEP grant awardees this year. Thank you very much. It's a great honor. I know myself and the rest of the team are really excited to be able to work with the Planetary Society on this research. Now, your co-I, your co-investigator, Rafael, was unable to join us today.

But would you introduce Laura, who is with us right now? Sure. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Laura Fackrell, who's a postdoctoral fellow at JPL and is one of our partners on the geology and the metagenomics of this project. So welcome, Laura, and congratulations to you as well. Thank you. Good to be here. Drew, we've talked before on this show about why growing at least some of your food is going to be so important on a long, long trip and stay on Mars and maybe even closer to home on the moon. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. You know, remind us, why is it going to be important to do some agriculture on these other worlds?

Sure. So there's a variety of reasons why it's really important. One of the most vital reasons is crew morale and support and nutrition. And I guess that's more than one thing. But as it turns out, a lot of fresh ingredients will not survive the journey to the moon, especially not to Mars. And so you need fresh produce and fresh vegetables in order to provide nutrients, but it's also taste and flavor, morale. There's a connection between human beings and our environment and plants are very much a part of that. And so I think, you know, there's a component for both food security and food safety of having plants that are

grown in soil, right, where you are in the terrain where you are, not just hydroponically. But there's also a component to this psychologically that we beneficial. So nobody has to, you know, convince me about the importance of fresh food. We have seen in Andy Weir's The Martian, both the book and the movie, of course, that was almost certainly most people's first exposure to growing food on another world. And Mark Watney, The Martian, managed to do it in Martian regolith with the healthy addition of some astronaut poop, I'm sure you know. So I don't know, what did you think when you read that in the book or saw it in the movie? Somebody doing what this project is actually all about. Several years ago, I actually

designed a project to look at growing plants on Mars. And it was before I'd ever read The Martian or seen the movie. I watched the movie with that perspective of like, oh, I'm actually doing this. But I think it was interesting to see that. I think it provides a really useful kind of excitement. Definitely. Drew? I read that long before I was ever involved in any of this kind of project. In the back of my mind, I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. I wonder how you would do something like that. That's not what I work on. And so then, you know, as I as I came here to Florida Tech, I my lab sort of migrated from the one area of research that we worked on into space agriculture.

I really began to look at that as sort of like, well, if it's good enough for Matt Damon, then, you know, it's got to be good enough for us. You know, I use it actually as a really good educational tool because I can say, OK, so you see him do this. It's not that simple. Yeah. But it's a powerful image in the movie and in the book. And I think it shows how strong of a connection we have for the concept of growing food, right? That we want to grow it in the dirt, right? There are certainly benefits to hydroponics. And I think one of the major points of this project is to not be dismissive of hydroponics. It's to try and find the right balance of what we need, right? You're not going to want to put all of your eggs in one basket, right, and rely on one way to grow food

when you're six months away from Earth. You're going to want to have multiple ways that the people there can get food. And so, you know, I think it's a great image. And this is obviously at the core of your proposal and the work that you're going to be doing, partly thanks to the award of the STEP grant. And in your proposal, which I recommend everybody read, it's fascinating, you actually have a hypothesis about this balance between hydroponics and what you call RBA. Do I have it right? Regolith-based agriculture? What is that hypothesis? So fundamentally, we believe that there's going to be a relationship, that there's not going to be a right answer for hydroponics or regolith. It's going to depend on the type of crop that you're trying to grow. So we think things that grow very, very quickly,

like a lot of microgreens that have been very popular in choices for space agriculture, those will probably be settled very easily by hydroponics. They grow quickly, very easily in those kind of systems. which is where I have a lot of experience in regolith simulants, and some of these other plants, that there'll be a trade-off where long-term it will become easier to grow these things in regolith. As you condition this material, which is not very friendly, not very hospitable for plant growth, but as you condition it over time, the benefits there are going to outweigh the use of trying to grow it hydroponically, right? And then we have an efficiency specialist looking with us to look at long-term sort of what we call the cradle-to-grave relationship, right? So if you factor in resupply missions to bring in new equipment for hydroponics versus fertilizer inputs for terrestrial agriculture, or I guess in

this regolith-based agriculture, where does that point break? And we think that's really what's going to come out of this, is an understanding of the trade-off. Yeah. And I think a big part of that, too, is considering the microbiome that the plants have. And that microbiome is really made to grow in a soil environment that's not supposed to evolve to be in. And it changes, and actually, certain types of microbiome relationships struggle in hydroponic settings. So to put it on the plant and how important certain microbial relationships

are, for example, legumes are a big one for that like peas and peanuts and different things that can participate with nitrogen fixation. That can be a big one that is important. That's really difficult to do hydroponically. So it's like trying to figure out how the healthy microbiome and how to balance that and which crops and kind of diversifying your system so it's more sustainable. Laura, I'm really glad that you brought this up because the microbiome, it's a big part of this project, but haven't we realized actually in fairly recent years

that there's so much going on there in the soil or wherever plants are growing and that it really is kind of a symbiotic relationship. I mean, there's so much of what we grow for food depends on these tiny little critters that make up the microbiome. Yeah, it's a huge question and one that we're just really scratching the surface on even in terrestrial agriculture. But there's a huge, not only the root microbiome, but also the above ground microbiome that takes place in the leaves and the stems and how that interacts with plants how that changes with if you fertilize and how that alters what relationships that has what nutrients it's allowed each uptake how it helps to fend against pathogenic um and infection lots of different mechanisms that microbes can use to

relate to plants. And depending on what you're doing to help grow those plants can affect so many different parts. So, you know, one of the things that I think is important, right, when we distinguish between hydroponics and RBA is hydroponics, you have fewer of those interactions that occur. In some ways, you have more control over the environment in a hydroponic system, I'd argue, than you do in a regolith-based system. Regolith-based agriculture is going to be just like traditional farming. You're going to have to tease out a little bit more about what's going on. But these microbial associations are so critical, and they can play a really big role in also helping us create a more sustainable ecosystem on these settlements right so how are we going to help process waste and these microbes

can be a participant in that process well drew said something important about you can technically more tightly control the hydroponics but you also have to more tightly control the hydroponics because if it goes out of that range you lose half your crop or even all your crop but there's a trade-off between like you can't control the regular maybe as much, but there are advantages to that. And that, so you just find that balance between the two. You know, we love to say space is hard. Maybe farming out there is even harder in some cases. I was so impressed, Drew, when I was reading the proposal by the experimental process that you describe and the type controls and the comprehensive data gathering that you've laid out.

It's pretty awesome. That's a real testament to Laura and Raphael's contributions as well. We've been working together as a team now for about two years on various projects. So this is the first real research project we've been doing, but we've been intellectually consulting and working together. And so this is a great opportunity for us. So I think you mentioned microgreens, lettuce, tomatoes, and I know that by microgreens, you're also talking about radishes. I have to say that if I was living on the moon or Mars and had to live on radishes, I'd probably go outside and take my helmet off. I'm not a big fan of radishes. But lettuce and tomatoes sounds just fine. You sort of addressed

this, but why those three choices? Why will these be your crops? A lot of this is because it's what we have seen before. If we're going to do a comparative study looking side by side, we want to use some of the most established crops possible. So for instance, the outregis lettuce is what's been grown in the veggie system on the International Space Station. And it's a lettuce that has gone all over the world. It is so highly grown just because of that. Those visual images are so powerful. But we also have a lot of information on how to grow it. So we've been growing it in my lab for three, four years now. So we really have a feel for how it's going in the regolith and whether or not we're about to lose a plant, we're about to get lettuce we can eat. And then the same is true on Raphael's experience working with the microgreens is

he's got a lot of experience working with those microgreens in lunar simulant. And so he has a good sense for the same thing. And so when we compare these to hydroponics, we'll have an understanding of what we're looking for. And then on my end, I have a lot of experience with tomatoes. And the other reason for bringing in the tomatoes is that both lettuce and microgreens are what we'd refer to as short term crops. If you think of like an index of edible biomass versus inedible biomass the most of those plants can be eaten right the microgreen you can eat everything the lettuce you can eat almost everything with the tomato there's a high amount of inedible biomass right large enough that you can't eat and you're

going to have to compost or recycle in some other way when you're on a lunar settlement or on a martian settlement and so that's really what we want to get at is when you start to have these inputs into the system that are going to have long-term impacts on waste management how well do those regolith hydroponic rules and trade-offs how well do they hold up right because you have to start thinking about the fact you're sinking carbon into these plants that you're parts of these plants that you're not going to eat for a while and nitrogen right and so you know that's that has the potential to skew how you gear your life support setup and so we want to think about that because also i i like tomatoes a lot so i want to i want to talk to other plants also i think if i had to live on just lettuce and radish microgreens, I wouldn't be so happy either.

Yeah. Yeah. OK, so we're together on that. Laura, part of what you bring to this project is just fascinating. First of all, you have those great resources in your lab there at JPL, which is, I guess, partly addresses how the STEP grant from the Planetary Society will leverage these other great resources. So, you know, thank you to NASA and others for, you know, making this an even greater project. But I think of, you know, the tools that you're going to use to examine what's happening at the smallest level. I mean, really at the level of the genome of these plants, right? DNA. Yeah. And that's the part that really kind of fascinates me. My current project that's related to this and kind of how I'm connecting in is looking at nitrogen and how we can recover that

from plant waste and different things like that, as Drew was talking about. And so I'm already looking at legume and rhizobia, which is that plant micro relationship that I talked about, where you have nitrogen fixation happening. And so now we can add on some of these other plants and see what they're doing and what is the microbiome that's happening and get a bigger picture for what is really big, complex questions. That's going to be really fascinating. Drew, what exactly will the funding from the STEP grant do? I mean, how is it enabling this? What's it going to pay for? You know, one of the great things is this actually, it wedges nicely into a bigger piece

of all of our research, you know, both Laura, mine, and Raphael's. And so in my case, we're working with another group from Arizona State University, where we're looking at the removal of toxic chlorlorates from Martian regoliths. So I don't know, I mean, probably most of your listeners are aware, but the surface of Mars has a really high concentration of perchlorates. And we've shown in our group that that basically kills almost every plant that you try to grow in it.

And so that's been something that we've been working on with them through an NSF grant to fund that. And so what we have is a great capacity for evaluating the nutritional quality and growth factors that are associated with a plant. And so where this funding fits in is it gives us an opportunity to help fund a student who will do a lot of this work and travel between my lab and Raphael's lab and actually kind of work on both ends at these institutions and bring these resources together so that we can analyze the plants. They'll isolate plant material so that they can send it to Laura for extraction. We'll be looking at what we call metabolomics, which is kind of a large-scale examination of all of the different small molecules, sugars, lipids, and small factors that are being made by the plant in order to

understand how it's growing differently between regolith and growing in hydroponics. It's a really great wedge into all of our work that fits nicely. Maybe the most exciting thing to me about this project is what it says about how close we are to actually putting humans maybe on the moon to live there but also sending them to mars that we are considering what's going to be necessary and it's going to be hard to to make this successful, to let those people thrive and do the work that we need them to do in these places. I mean, do you ever, you know, sit back from your data for a minute or two and think, wow, we're really part of this effort to put humans on another world? Yeah, so I just took a bunch of undergrads to a regional plant biology

conference in Arkansas. And we were working on all their posters. And we've got mushrooms growing in regolith and all these different things that we're working on. And they're so excited, and it's infectious. You know, so yeah, it's a it's a fantastic line of work. I mean, just to sit back and think about how the discussions we're having are not like, can we survive there? It's a fantastic line of work. I mean, just to sit back and think about how the discussions we're having are not like, can we survive there? It's more about like, are we going to grow hydroponically? Or are we going to grow in the dirt? And which is the right one to do?

The very fact that we're actually having a calculated discussion and study into the optimization of what you're going to grow means we're past the stage of, can we grow there? We know we can, right? We know that we're going to be able to. The question is, is what's going to be the most efficient and the best opportunity for the settlers on those missions? I think it's also a topic that people easily relate to. Sometimes when you talk about your science and you get deep and people are like, I have no idea. But this is like, it's a really easy topic. You can say, oh, I, my project works on growing plants in the moon or on Mars. And they're like, oh, that's cool. They can just instantly connect

with that. And so it's really exciting just to be able to talk to people about it. And it's also just really exciting to inspire people to like get excited about science. Especially students in high school who are like science is too hard. And you're like, it can be hard. That's true. But look what you can do with it. And it's a really easy topic to help students become excited. And that's a really cool thing. It's been a great educational tool for just engaging students and teaching

them basics of, and I have students who come through my lab. They're like, I'm not interested in plants. And I'm like, just wait, you know, and by the time we're done, they're converted, they care about plants, they care about environmental science and soils and erosion, and they understand better the world, you know, again, it's showing us how we can use what kind of piggybacking off of what Laura said that we, you know, we can use these tools to educate a next generation of people who are not only interested in space, but also in how this world works and the challenges that we're facing here, right? So they understand better when they see, God, it's gonna be so hard to grow there because of nitrogen issues and fertilizer. And we say, well, why don't you go look down the street at

the farm there and see the challenges that they're facing. It shows them about how biology is biology wherever you're going to go, right? And so these fundamental rules is what we're teaching. You have proven with even just this last point, these collateral benefits of this project, why this project, Evaluation of Food Production Systems for Lunar and Martian Agriculture, was such a great choice. Congratulations once again on becoming the only the second year recipient of a STEP grant from the Planetary Society. I only wish that I could be around in 50 or 60 years to hear the arguments between hydroponic farmers and regolith farmers on Mars about who has the superior way of growing food for the Martian colony. Great to talk to both of you. And I think you can count on us asking you

to be back when the project is farther along to give us a little report here on Planetary Radio. But thanks so much and congrats again. Thank you. Thank you. Andrew Palmer, Principal Investigator for one of the two 2023 STEP grant projects just funded by the Planetary Society. His colleague and collaborator Laura Fackrell is a postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California. Congratulations again to both of our STEP grant teams. It's time to welcome back Bruce and what's up. Hey, Bruce, welcome back. I'm going to tell you a cute fact that Jacob Buffo mentioned to me after we stopped recording, because he talked about in the interview how he had made previous

trips up to those salty lakes in British Columbia. And they worked hard when they collected samples, not to pick up any critters. But one time they accidentally picked up a little brine shrimp and they brought it back to the lab and gave it a name. He became Jeffrey, the brine shrimp, who was the mascot of the lab. He lived for another two or three years.

Oh my gosh. Probably longer than he would have made it in that salty lake. Yeah, I'm guessing. All those brine shrimp predators. Listen, that's what's past. What's up? What's up is Venus, Matt. Venus, about its highest, right around its highest point in the sky this time around in its appearance. Super bright. Brightest star-like object over in the west after sunset uh easy easy easy to see and it's it's a good time uh but you can also look a little

bit higher and there's a much much much dimmer reddish mars it will be growing closer to venus over the next few weeks and I'll update you on that. And you can also check out in the pre-dawn, we've got Saturn now, yellowish high up in the east before dawn, and Jupiter actually getting much easier to see low down to the horizon in the east, looking super bright. Mercury is kind is near Jupiter. If you can pick it up soon, it's below Jupiter, but will be getting lower over the next few days. So a lot of good planet action, pre-dawn or evening. And during the middle of the day, you can look down between your feet and see the Earth.

All right, let's go on to what was, what shall be and what still is, which is this week in space history. And, uh, in this week in space history, 1966, Surveyor One landed on the moon, soft lander, robotic lander from the U.S. And in 2003, which I think is strangely 20 years ago, Mars Express launched, uh, European Space Agency, Mars Orbiter. strangely 20 years ago mars express launched uh european space agency mars orbiter and uh it's still doing its thing at mars very impressive that's this week's profound space fact but let me give you a less profound random space fact i've missed that so ap Apollo 11, they just tried to sleep for a little bit on flat surfaces on the floor, essentially the lunar module.

Apparently, both of them pretty much failed to get any sleep. They tried hammocks in the later Apollos, and there was some more success, but still found it tricky just sleeping with with the you're still in gravity so but you're in a little tiny space and all sorts of other issues now of course on the international space station they just kick back and relax in sleeping bags and float around and have crazy crazy crazy dreams yeah someday someday i want to give it a shot i I'll sleep on a hard metal floor. I'll give that a shot, especially at one sixth gravity. But just just get me up there. I'll sleep like a baby. Your willingness is a guinea pig is something I've always let's say admired.

Let's use the word admired. That's good. I like that. All right. So we move on to. So I asked we were we played we played Where in the Solar System? And I asked you, where in the solar system is there a crater named Macbeth? How'd we do, Matt?

You know, I don't get the entries anymore. And all I have is our winner. So apologies to any of you out there. And I'm sure there were many who made very clever answers to this and probably emulated the bard himself. But all I've got is our winner, Linda Yarbrough from Anchorage, Alaska. She said, Macbeth Crater is on Oberon, a moon of Uranus. Out, damn crater. A moon of Uranus. Out, damn crater!

The prize, Linda, that you're going to get is a Good Night Oppie 12-ounce thermal mug. I've seen these. They're swell. Use it in good health as you listen to planetary radios. Congratulations. Congratulations. And so I guess we'll go on and we'll go back to the topic of sleep. According to official records, who was the first person to sleep in space? Was it Matt Kaplan? Was it someone else? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

Cool. All right. I'll try and stay awake for this. You have until June 7, Wednesday, June 7 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one. And Sarah, let me know that she has exactly one JWST poster left. The really, really cool James Webb Space Telescope posters that I think she's given away a couple of at least. Could be yours if you get it right and you're chosen. So get us those entries and you'll hear the answer from Bruce and Sarah in a couple of weeks. Hey, Matt, great to have you back.

Keep guesting, keep checking out, keep hanging out. We keep on trucking. In the meantime, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky and think about it. Sarah will return next week. Her guest, Serafina Nance, has written Starstruck, a science-packed memoir about how this Egyptian-American astrophysicist and analog astronaut overcame obstacles in her reach for the sky. This has been great fun. I hope you'll hear from me again soon. In the meantime, I'll see those of you who are Planetary Society members in our online community, where I host the book club. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by our members who make the STEP grants and so much more happen. You can step up at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Ray Paletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is the audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra.