Undergraduate Student Florida Institute of Technology Melbourne, Florida
Body of Abstract: The settlement of Mars will require materials that are renewable and readily available. It will be important to maximize the use of supplies brought along on the journey to the red planet as well as those already present, creating challenges of sustainability and food production that must be addressed to create a self-reliant Martian population. An in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) approach leverages on-site Martian resources to employ sustainable crop production in order to provide a consistent food source. Martian regolith, the most abundant resource of the red planet, has the potential to become a plant growth substrate, as many of its inorganic nutrients are necessary for plant growth. Many autotrophic pioneering species of cyanobacteria can fix carbon and nitrogen as well as survive harsh ultraviolet and desiccated conditions. We hypothesize that these pioneering species can be utilized on Mars to perform the same activities, exploiting available atmospheric gases and nutrients in the regolith to improve the viability of regolith as a plant growth substrate. In this study, the quick-growing cyanobacteria Anabaena cylindrica is introduced to Martian regolith simulant (MRS) to characterize the changes to the substrate its carbon and nitrogen fixation processes make and determine the potential for the species to improve plant growth in Martian regolith. These findings will impact understanding of how Earthly ecology and farming methods can be applied to the pursuit of supporting extraterrestrial settlements.