Dean's Faculty Update
Kennedy Space Center: IFAS Research
Date: June 8th, 2009
From: Mark R. McLellan, Dean
IFAS Faculty ----
In February, the Deans for Research visited Kennedy Space Center to see firsthand the exciting research being done by IFAS researchers. At KSC, IFAS researchers work in collaboration with NASA at the Space Life Sciences Lab. UF/IFAS faculty and students work on many projects that are leading us closer to unlocking the mysteries of how organisms can survive and thrive in space.
The Center for Space Agriculture and Biotechnology Research and Education program (also known as SABRE) at the Kennedy Space Center was launched in 2002. Directed by Robert Ferl, a UF professor of horticultural sciences, the program seeks to develop plant-based techniques to create regenerative life-support systems in space.
The program is dedicated to finding ways to get plants to survive the rigors of spaceflight. Ferl and his colleagues are working on greenhouses that could allow plants to grow on the surface of Mars.
Large-scale greenhouses are likely to be part of any manned mission to Mars, where they would provide astronauts with food, water and oxygen. But small-scale greenhouses, designed to test the soil of the Red Planet, could find their way onto a Mars lander as early as the next decade.
Ferl and his SABRE colleagues have already launched a number of "botanical astronauts," sending plant experiments on shuttle missions to determine how spaceflight affects plant metabolism and reproduction. Their research may lead to genetically-engineered crops designed to thrive in the low-pressure greenhouses that would likely be part of a long-term base on Mars or the Earth's Moon.
Today, Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul, a UF plant molecular biologist, study biological adaptation to space by developing plants and the systems to grow them that could be on Mars within decades as the forerunners to full-scale greenhouses used to supply food, water and oxygen to the first Mars colonists. Ferl and Paul have started a long-term experiment on the International Space Station with the launch of Columbia STS-93 carrying their most recent experiment.
Sending experiments to the space station enables the researchers to see what happens to the plants over a longer time. Researchers need an idea of how plants will survive the difficulties of space.
Back on Earth, the researchers are using data from the Mars Exploration Rovers — Spirit and Opportunity. One graduate student is trying to grow plants in soil created to mimic the chemical composition of the soil the rovers have encountered during their multi-year journeys across the Martian surface.
According to researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Mars Rovers have found the Martian soil to be mostly silicon and iron, with significant levels of chlorine and sulfur.
Paul says that knowing what the Martian soil is like allows researchers to develop plants that will do better under those unique conditions.
Wayne Nicholson, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Science, also looks at the survival and proliferation of microorganisms in extreme extraterrestrial environments. A portion of the spore resistance and longevity research in his lab is concentrated on placing physical constraints on lithopanspermia theory, which postulates the transfer of viable microorganisms between planets as the result of natural impact processes. His research is also concerned with whether spacecraft are carrying strange organisms back and forth from Earth into space and even from other planets back here.
Andrew Schuerger, a research assistant professor of plant pathology, pursues research on topics as diverse as Mars astrobiology, global movement of plant pathogens, plant pathology issues in bioregenerative life support systems for human mission to the Moon and Mars, and the use of remote sensing to detect plant stress. Since 2003 he has conducted research at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory at KSC.
Schuerger's current research emphasis is on the survival, growth, and adaptation of terrestrial microorganisms in simulated martian conditions; the remote detection of extant microbial life (if present) in endolithic and epilithic environments on Mars; and the effects of hypobaric environments on the growth and development of plants in Mars analog soils. In addition, Schuerger is working on various projects in Mars astrobiology, control of plant pathogens in bioregenerative life support systems, and the development of plant and microbial bioassays for determining the biosafety of returned Mars samples.
Jamie Foster, an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Science, asks herself what molecular and biochemical mechanisms are required by microbes to tolerate and grow in space and Mars-like ecosystems. The overall objective of her research is to examine the establishment and maintenance of complex microbial mat ecosystems under Earth and simulated Martian conditions. Her work also examines the limitation of Earth-derived life under non-Earth conditions.
Foster works on a problem called carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration is a technique for the long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon, for the mitigation of global warming. Carbon dioxide is usually captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical or physical processes. It has been proposed as a way to mitigate the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere released by the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate. Foster works with microbialites, which naturally remove carbon dioxide from the environment.
These faculty researchers and the graduate students who work with them at the Kennedy Space Center form an IFAS family, working together through the process of launching experiments into space and sending exciting new research findings back to earth. Whether there is or has been life on other planets and how to sustain human life off Earth are big questions to consider. IFAS researchers are leading the way in answering these questions, maybe even in the not-so-distant future.
Mark R. McLellan
Dean for Research, IFAS
Director, Florida Agricultural Experiment Station
