A journey of 35 million miles starts with a single … vegetable patch.
Just 100 candidates — including four Canadians — remain on an international short list to make a one-way trip to Mars by 2025. While they prepare for the next phase of the selection process, crop scientists in the Netherlands are wrestling with the question asked before any road trip: What’ll we eat?
What’s Martian soil like?
Ecologist Wieger Wamelink has been getting his hands dirty addressing the practical demands of the $6-billion Mars One project. Experiments with 14 crops grown in simulated soil — modelled on that of Mars and the moon, based on the volcanic soil of Hawaii, and provided by NASA — have seen all of them germinate.
