My name is Dr. Gene Giacomelli and I will be speaking to you about feeding the future as well as the present using plants to keep us alive, healthy, and nourished. There will be three segments to my presentations. Part one will focus on describing the flow of energy and materials to produce food. My educational goals are first to introduce you to plants and how they provide food production in agriculture life on planet Earth. Also how they participate in the natural cycles that we've heard about in the past, and how they use thermodynamics and mass balances to keep it all going. Ultimately, I want to use the example of the Arizona NASA Mars Lunar Greenhouse as an example. I am the director and professor of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona. We are scientists and engineers that work together to develop greenhouse hydroponic systems for urban agriculture, for extreme climates on Earth such as the South Pole, and even for hot climates on Earth as well as extreme climates when we leave the planet. You see examples here of the greenhouses on Earth, tomatoes being produced in greenhouses and the example of the Lunar Greenhouse. The Lunar Greenhouse prototype is a bioregenerative life support system. It's a NASA supported space grant project here at the University of Arizona. It's internationally supported both here and in Italy. Its goals, overall technical objective is to develop the technical merit and the feasibility of a high fidelity structure the prototype Lunar Greenhouse itself, and the hydroponic system that will be housed inside in this case, cable culture. We will demonstrate and evaluate its performance. An example at Biosphere2 is this model of the prototype Lunar Greenhouse, and it's available for people to see so we can outreach and provide education for those interested on how we may provide food for our travelers in space in the future. The greenhouse itself is a cylinder. Its collapsible, 2.1 metres in diameter, about eight feet, 5.5 metres long, about 18 feet. This volume is theorized to provide all of the oxygen, all of the water, and one half of the food calories for one astronaut on a daily basis. It is lightweight. It is collapsible to be able to be transported to the other planet. But let's look at the biological processes that must go on to produce these crops. The first is photosynthesis which is using light energy to produce sugars and oxygen in green plants. Second is respiration, which is the plants way of consuming it's stored energy to produce more biomass. Third is transpiration, and that's the movement of water from the root system of the plant, through the leaves to the atmosphere around the plant. Next is nutrient uptake, and these are the salts that the plant needs that are dissolved in the water for biochemical processes for growth and development. And finally, typically not considered, is what I call master of its domain. Plants have figured out a very special way to create us, help us care for them throughout their life, and we get enjoyment out of it as well. What nature's cycles are occurring? Carbon Cycle, that's essentially taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making biomass and that needs energy through photosynthesis to make that occur. The second half of the carbon cycle is respiration, and that's the consumption of that stored energy using oxygen to grow and maintain the plant, and that's taking biomass and making it into ultimately carbon dioxide. The photosynthesis equation is characteristic here. It's defined as carbon dioxide with water in the presence of a green leaf and light that produces a simple sugar, plus oxygen, and of course the oxygen is the atmospheric oxygen that we ultimately breathe. In the process, energy is converted, light powers photosynthesis, that sunlight or lamps, but also it adds heat to leaf. That heat has to be dissipated and the plant does that by cooling itself by evaporating water by transpiration. Another cycle is the Hydrogen Cycle or the Water Cycle. Liquid water is transferred into water vapor by evaporation and this needs energy. In the process, the plant does transpiration from the leaf evaporating that water. How does it do it? Well, the leaf is warmed by the sun or by the lamps that we light the plants with, and it cools itself by evaporating that water. It also has higher humidity and it naturally moves the higher humidity from within the leaf to the lower humidity that surrounds the leaf. To maintain that lower humidity around the leaf, we have air movement. In the open field, it's wind, in the greenhouse it's by fans. Finally, the last half of the water cycle is taking the water vapor and condensing it back to liquid causing condensation which provides energy back into the environment. We need to keep in mind the environmental factors which influence plant growth. They are listed here, the air temperature, and humidity, the light in terms of its intensity and duration, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, water provided to the roots with nutrients and dissolved oxygen. In our Lunar Greenhouse, this is at day zero with young plants. We allow them to grow in our optimum environment and 60 days later, we see that the plants have produced a massive amount of biomass, and we monitor all this. Essentially, we're looking at the resources that are expensive and what needs to be brought into the system. We have the input of energy, electrical power, water, nutrients, carbon dioxide, and hand labor. And then the outputs are the oxygen to breathe, the water to drink, and the biomass food to eat. Let's look in a little detail about the water cooled lamps. These are high pressure sodium lamps that provide the light photon energy for the plants to grow. The hydroponic system is a unique cable culture that I'll look in more detail. It is a recirculating hydroponic system. Essentially, it's a cable stretched the length of the greenhouse, covered with a plastic sheet to create a teardrop shape on top of the cable. Water is introduced in the black tube on either side of either end of the row. The water flows to the middle of the row and is discharged in that black tube in the center of this picture. Here you see mature plants hanging on the cables suspended in our Lunar Greenhouse. Here's a seedling plant near maturity actually that has been taken out, and you can see the root system in this rock wool substrate that is at the bottom of the trough. For those who are interested in production numbers, I put them here. I'm not going to talk about that in detail except to say in the center there, the biomass production capability, that is the total biomass produced per unit area of production, per unit time, in this case a year, we were able to get 73 kilograms per square metre per year, a very significant amount of yield that we need to evaluate. Water usage. We were able to collect 26 litres of water a day out of this system, and recover 86 percent of it and account for 97 per cent of it, because we are a closed system, but we're not perfectly closed. Energy. Biomass produce per kilowatt hour of electric power is key. Between 21 and 29 grams per kilowatt hour for the total amount of biomass, and between 11 and 15 grams of biomass of edible biomass per kilowatt hour. The edible obviously is critical for us, what we wish to eat. Here you see more details of experiments that were done to verify these numbers. Even more detail about operations of biomass increase per day, water produced per day, consumption, these are things that if you're operating the system you need to know. The next two slides are the details about how we grew the plants, the number of plants, the variety of plants, their spacing within the row, as well as the environmental conditions that we provided. I won't go through them in detail but they're here for you to look at in your leisure. And of course, we need to put this together in a system, a habitat, and this is Phil Sadler of Sadler Machine Company's idea of what a Lunar Greenhouse, habitat could be. If you see here, this is just sitting on the surface, but beneath the surface under these white devices are wings of cylinders where people could live and work, and some of them could be the Lunar Greenhouse where they're growing food. It has to be buried of course because there's no atmosphere on the moon and it needs to be protected from the cosmic rays as well as the micrometeorites. Earthlight was a video documentary that was created about the Lunar Greenhouse. I encourage you to look it up and see it. It actually is an Emmy Award winning documentary. We appreciate Cody Sheehy who created that documentary for us. The last series of slides. This is the quad chart that shows other projects that are going on in not just food production but energy management, energy collection, and automated control using computer vision. You could look to that in more detail. Finally, I would like to thank you for listening and provide thanks to those who collaborated in this project, many people from NASA, from locally, the Lunar Planetary Laboratory, as well as Phil Sadler's Sadler Machine Company, and all the students that aren't listed here unfortunately that worked on this project over the past eight years. More information can be found at our Lunar Greenhouse website, and more information can be found at the CEAC, the Controlled Environment Agriculture web site. My last image is of education, and this is our laboratory where students get hands on experience in our Controlled Environment Agriculture Educational Program at the University of Arizona, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. This has been in operation since 1998, more than 1,500 students have come through this program, and we look forward to many more in the future. I thank you for your time, and I appreciate if there is an opportunity that we can meet in the future, I'd love to show you our facilities and maybe even do some presentation and educational programs. Thank you very much.
