Waste Not, Want Not On The Road To Mars
just imagine how big those Martian rats are going get |
Devon Island - July 9, 2001
When the first humans go to Mars, they will need to pack very carefully. Everything for a three-year trip will need to fit into one small spacecraft. Once on the journey, the astronauts will throw nothing away, including human waste. Precisely how to turn such waste into food, oxygen and water is the subject of an ESA project, which is building a small pilot plant outside Barcelona, Spain.
The plant is shortly to be scaled-up and tested on real consumers -- three rats, whose oxygen demand and carbon dioxide production is roughly equivalent to that of one human. The rats will be kept under close veterinary supervision throughout.
"We are creating an artificial ecosystem which uses micro-organisms to process the waste so that we can grow plants," says Christophe Lasseur from the Melissa project team at ESA's technical centre ESTEC in the Netherlands. Melissa (Micro-Ecological Life Support Alternative) goes further than other recycling systems used on Mir or the International Space Station which purify water and recycle exhaled carbon dioxide, but do not attempt to recycle organic waste for food production.
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