Spotlight   |   Spring 2004

Mission to Mars

Horticulture professor Cary Mitchell leads a team of Purdue researchers who are designing an artificial, closed ecosystem to support human life on NASA's planned mission to Mars. The research is funded by a $10-million NASA grant. (Photo by Tom Campbell)

It takes real foresight to envision technologies that won't be used for another 20 years—let alone those that won't even be used on Earth. But that is the mission of staff at Purdue University's NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training in Advanced Life Support (ALS-NSCORT), a multidisciplinary research center where the goal is to develop technologies to support long-term human survival during a mission to Mars.

The Mars mission came one step closer to reality last winter, when President Bush announced plans to establish a lunar base as a way station for future interplanetary travel. NASA doesn't expect to return to the moon until 2015 at the earliest, and the target for the first human mission to Mars is 2030. Purdue researchers are in the early stages of developing the systems necessary for life support beyond Earth's atmosphere. Those systems will be tested first on the moon. “It's a logical step to return to the moon before going to Mars,” says Cary Mitchell, ALS-NSCORT director. “Establishing a base on the moon will give us more practice in space and the opportunity to test out the technologies we develop.”

Mitchell oversees a team of food scientists, horticulturists, aquaculture specialists and engineers at Purdue and ALS-NSCORT partner institutions Alabama A&M University and Howard University who are working together to resolve the many challenges of life in an extra-terrestrial habitat.

“We're trying to mimic what goes on in nature by designing an artificial, closed ecosystem for human habitation in space,” Mitchell says. That means Mitchell and his colleagues need to develop systems to provide energy; recycle and circulate air, water and nutrients; decompose and recycle solid wastes; control temperature and humidity levels; grow crops; and even protect astronauts from cosmic radiation, to which they will be exposed once they leave Earth's protective atmosphere and magnetic field.