Life Support Project
From: Terry Kok
Shannon, The figure is from personal experience with orange blossoms, coupled with experience living in BIOSTAR-A, extrapolated according to the 23 m2 average space requirements for full food production per person I posted about a month ago. According to my calculations it would take 15 minutes (or less) to do all the cross-polination, if all the flowers were ready at the same time. Of course the flowers will be ready at different times so we might say that it takes about a minute or less per day per person to do the job. A paint brush works as well as a feather. I'm only talking about vegetables, not exotic plants which might be harder to do by hand, depending on the species.
Terry R. Kok at biostar_a@yahoo.com
--- Shannon Rupert
>>= Remember, in the case of personal >>life support (not terraforming) complete > hand/feather pollination would take only about 15 minutes (or > less) in a 23 m2 (per person) CELSS. > Terry- >> Where did you get this estimate? Is it per day? > Let me know. Thanks. > Shannon Marie Rupert
[ to Mars Society Arctic Base TF & discussion ] [ from Shannon Rupert
>Say, is anybody into the idea of using sniffer chips >(http://www.techreview.com/articles/july99/greenberg.htm) to measure >concentration over time of literally hundreds of different chemicals within the system? It is my understanding that these devices are qualitative, not quantitative. There is an article regarding the technology in the March 2000 issue of American Laboratory as well. Does anybody know of any company who has or will be developing a reliable quantitative detector? Shannon Marie Rupert
> In a message dated 04/06/2000 10:41:41 AM, > biostar_a@yahoo.com writes: ><< I saw one of these [sulfur lamps] in operation at > Kennedy Spaceflight > Center. It was so bright (like the sun) that I > couldn't look at it. It also made a lot of heat. >>>> On Mars, or the Moon, where too much heat buildup > could be a problem, the bulb/lamp could be outside with the fiber optic and > light pipe system delivering the light alone. In fact, these lamps > could use the same light delivery system used for bringing in sunlight. > Peter
We can probably use the heat in the CELSS to keep the plant beds warm. What is the cost per watt for a sulphur lamp? Terry at biostar_a@yahoo.com
In a message dated 04/06/2000 06:07:34 PM, dean@baloney.com writes:
<< Here's a question about those sulfur lights: Don't they use a microwave (klystron) to excite the sulfur?>> I don't recall reading that, Check the website. www.sulfurlamp.com << If so, what are the shielding implications re: wireless comms. >> If so, that's a good question to put to the manufacturer! Check the website for email address. They are in use at the Smithsonian, KSC, and elsewhere, and if there were a problem such as you envisage, I don't think they would be using them there. Peter
--- sonja g holmes
Yes, you can make glass by fusing any silicate material. But to make transparent window glass is another thing. Then you need certain elements, and may want to exclude other elements. However, there are currently many formulations for glass. Glass is strong but brittle. Under a contract from Space Studies Institute, Brant Goldsworthy of Goldsworthy-Alcoa Engineering, experimented more than a decade ago with making glass glass composites. First you make glass fibers out of material with a relatively high melting point. Then you make a glass matrix, in which to embed the fibers, out of material with a relatively low melting point. The result is a composite that is not brittle, twice as strong as steel, and very versatile.
Unfortunately, to date, only ice cube sized lab samples exist. The educated guessing is that we could fabricate with these composites in ways analogous (except for temperature) with which we fabricate with fiberglass resin composites. It would be great to take this out of the realm of educated guessing. The reason the research was done was to find building materials (for solar power satellites, for example) that could be made from the lunar regolith without too much processing or refining of the material. Goldsworthy used lead to dope the matrix mix and bring down its melting point, and I have been vocally critical of this. Lead is found on the Moon in parts per billion and would have to be imported from Earth which defeats the purpose. You can get the melting point almost as low by using a sodium and potassium rich batch. Both these elements are present in parts per thousand on the Moon, and presumably on Mars, and that's reasonably good. It would be nice to get this technology on-the-shelf. That means developing it and debugging it in diverse applications and items. The problem facing developers of new materials is negative cost competitiveness. I've suggested a business plan where perceived value is more important than cost: high end furniture. If we took colored glass fibers, and embeded them in a grain pattern in clear glass matrix, we might just end up with an esthetically pleasing material that was not only hard (versus plasitcs) but extremely durable. Once we found out what we could do with it there, we could start vying for market share with boat hulls, doors, pipes, and architectural products. Anyway, now the secret is out. That's what I would do with my winnings if I won the powerball. The weak point in that strategy is that I don't buy lottery tickets. On transparency. Often one of the rare earth elements (would have to look it up, maybe prasmodemium?) has to be added to the batch to bleach out elements which tend to add color or opacity. On Earth that is no problem. It may be a long time before we are producing individual rare earth elements on Mars.
But here is a material (glass composites) that could be used for habitat module parts, other building components, as well as furniture. Using plain glass for a geodesic dome for example would probably require an adaptation for the pressure situation. Glass is strongest in compression. So if your panes were convex, curved inward, and held against the geodesic dome frame and an intervening gasket just by simple excessive air pressure (excessive compared to the near vacuum outside) it might work, and have few leaks if all the parts were machined to close tolerances. You could put an outside layer of flat glass panes held out a few inches from the geodesic frame to serve as sacrificial panes, taking the hit from any stray meteorites for example.
But for shielding, needed if humans are going to spend substantial accumulated time underneath, you need thickness. This could be thickness of the glass - but the thicker it is, the longer it takes to cool and anneal, and the more likely it is to develop stress cracks if hurried. If you go with lots of thinner layers, and you get moisture in between, you will have the steamed up compromise seal thermopane problem multiplied. One thing I thought about was a geodesic dome such as described above, with several feet of crushed glass piled on top. that would work shielding wise, but I think it would cut light transmission drastically, and color it as well (green?)
A more interesting idea, if we could pull it off, but it would require a lot of active plumbing, is a two layer dome with a couple of meters of water in between. The water would softly filter the light, and just possibly give the filtered sunlight a sky blue tint. But this is only an idea several people (at the Millennium Foundation, now renamed the Living Universe Foundation) have been toying with. We'd need one heck of a lot of experimenting. If someone could make it work and make it fairly accident proof, it might provide a really nice environment. I have a sketch of the idea at: http://members.aol.com/Tanstaaflz/hydrodome.gif Peter
[ to Mars Society Arctic Base TF & discussion ] [ from Curtis Snow
At 20:34 -0400 2000.04.06, KokhMMM@aol.com wrote:
>A more interesting idea, if we could pull it off, but it would require a lot of active plumbing, is a two layer dome with a couple of meters of water in between...
this sort of thing was talked about at a couple of Case for Mars` for vehicles getting to and back from Mars as a shield against cosmic rays and solar flares mainly to get away from having to build a small shielded (read "mass penalty") safe haven for the crew during radiation "events" etc the radiation experts loved it and the aerospace engineers weirded out I think it was and still is the best solution for a long duration (away from CIS-Lunar space) mission an real opportunity to leverage engineering, human factors, logistics and safety considerations into mass savings both in transit and on the planetary surface
"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem." --Thomas Szasz
--- Kmicheels@aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/30/00 12:22:00 PM EST, > biostar_a@yahoo.com writes: >><< BIOS 1 (Soviet Union) closed the loop with an > algae based system. It worked but Chlorela stinks, isn't > very tasty, and generates biogas in the human > intestines. BIOS 3 (Russia) closed the loop with > mostly higher plant eco-based systems. The trouble > here is that they imported nutrient solutions and > exported human feces. The Biosphere 2 TEST MODULE > (not the main structure) closed the loop using biology. > Yes, there is a lot of work to do but it is not as > much as many folks imagine. The main problem is not > necessarily with the ecosystems but with the COST > OF THE CONTAINMENT VESSEL. it is very hard to achieve > a low enough leak rate to be considered a "closed > system". ECLSS and CELSS research are bogged down > in the NASA context due to several reasons: >>>> Terry... >> can you recommend some references regarding the > Russian work? >> kam
bios3 info: http://www.aibs.org/biosciencelibrary/vol47/oct97.salisbury.text.html
Gray water has been/is in a 100% (minus evaporation losses) loop for over 3 years now. I use a 138 square feet of plant growth space to do so. When I originally designed/built BIOSTAR-A there were few published figures on size of ecosystem per person ratios. I designed too small for 4 permanent residents and guests. About 6-8 people use the system per day. The system worked fine with both gray and black water as long as it was only me (one person). When the family moved in and guests started coming I had to route the black water to an outside composter. I lose about 2 pints of H2O per day from this. The composted solids are used directly in the garden. BIOSTAR-B, the 2 person heremeticly sealed testbed I'm designing now (to be built in late 2000 or early 2001) will complete the water, waste, and atmospheric loops.
Terry R. Kok - Starlight Technology biostar_a@yahoo.com (812)275-0694
--- Kmicheels@aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/31/00 2:04:32 PM EST, > biostar_a@yahoo.com writes: > Hi Terry: >><< I don't have an RV. I live in a 3584 sq.ft. > testbed for CELSS-style technologies called BIOSTAR-A. I > have no monitoring/sensors in BIOSTAR-A. I wish I could > afford them. The closed loop water/waste system is > passive, gravity feed. There is a 12VDC pressure > pump at the clean water "end" of the system which pumps > the water to the sinks, shower, toilet. I also have an > ozonator in the system which I haven't been using > for about 6 months now (no need). No other power is > needed to ensure proper recycling. The biology does the > job. >>>> When I met you in Orlando in '98 I believe you had > not yet closed the water loop. You apparently have now. Do you separate the black water from grey? > Are you process both? Just curious. >> Kurt
[ To Mars Society Civilization & Culture Group ] [ from Jimbro6543@aol.com ]
Yes, but it is apples that need cold to get the best, they grow in worm or cool. Strawberries are grown close to Disneyland in southern California. It almost never freezes there, but what you are saying is true.
We do know that the language the bees use to tell others where flower or honey is used the position of the sun, and a ratio of how long to fly with the number of abdomen wiggles. A bee comes in with honey, faces a directions in relation to up and the sun. Then wiggles. Then the other bees go to where the first found the honey while the first deposits the honey. This could be a problem with bees where we use the periscope type light tubes. There is no thought there, or intelligence, just genetic programming over hundreds of millions of years.
Settling Mars this decade? Jim Brown ; < )
In response to:
In a message dated 4/6/00 06:48:16 Pacific Daylight Time, Tanstaaflz@aol.com writes:
> In a message dated 04/06/2000 01:39:08 AM, mystul@myavista.com writes: >><< I can see modularization to allow "migration".....if it is needed. With environments virtually stable with regards to heat, humidity, etc. most critters wouldn't migrate. The only conditions I can see to make animals want to migrate, would be to cause climactic change in the domes, to cause real seasons (hmm.. be able to down hill ski in the martian alps...) >>>> Charlie, I was not talking about migrating species, just about pollinators who nest in one kind of environment, and forage in another e.g. trees and adjacent meadows, etc. Bees do not live immediately among the plants they pollinate, any more than we humans live in our offices or factories. That's all the diversity we may need. > Providing for truly migrating species would be monumental. > Now we could easily maintain slightly different climes in connected modules. > In the grocery store, lower temperatures are maintained in open meat cases, for example. We may want some agricultural areas to have real seasons. Some of the fruits we are used to eating require seasonal freezing, I believe. No seasons, no strawberries. Now I like tropical fruits too. It depends on what we want. The more variety of food we want to enjoy, the more variety of agricultural climes we will need to provide. > Now there is a problem with bee navigation. We could do experiments in big hangers here on Earth with the concentrated sunlight channelled through openings in the ceiling but passing through polarizing filters to see if that would give the bees the type of direction and time of day clues they need. > No one has tried this to my knowledge. The problem with channeled sunlight is that without any corrective clues (polarization?) we lose all sense of what direction the sunlight is coming from, or of how it changes during the day. > As to animal intruders, we have to be careful what we bring in the first place. This all needs a lot of brainstorming. We have to sit down and list all the reasons it won't work. Then we have to figure out how we are going to make it work anyway. Without that attitude towards Mars, we might as well just read science fiction. >> Peter
NEWS RELEASE, 1/27/00
Patent filed on energy discovery: UC Berkeley and Colorado scientists find valuable new source of fuel
By Kathleen Scalise, Public Affairs
Click here for 300dpi print quality photo of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii culture
BERKELEY-- A metabolic switch that triggers algae to turn sunlight into large quantities of hydrogen gas, a valuable fuel, is the subject of a new discovery reported for the first time by University of California, Berkeley, scientists and their Colorado colleagues. The news appears in this month's issue of the journal "Plant Physiology."
"I guess it's the equivalent of striking oil," said UC Berkeley plant and microbial biology professor Tasios Melis. "It was enormously exciting, it was unbelievable."
Melis and postdoctoral associate Liping Zhang of UC Berkeley made the discovery - funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hydrogen Program - with Dr. Michael Seibert, Dr. Maria Ghirardi and postdoctoral associate Marc Forestier of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.
Currently, hydrogen fuel is extracted from natural gas, a non-renewable energy source. The new discovery makes it possible to harness nature's own tool, photosynthesis, to produce the promising alternative fuel from sunlight and water. A joint patent on this new technique for capturing solar energy has been taken out by the two institutions.
So far, only small-scale cultures of the microscopic green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have been examined in the laboratory for their hydrogen production capabilities, Melis said.
"In the future, both small-scale industrial and commercial operations and larger utility photobioreactor complexes can be envisioned using this process," Melis said.
While current production rates are not high enough to make the process immediately viable commercially, the researchers believe that yields could rise by at least 10 fold with further research, someday making the technique an attractive fuel-producing option.
Preliminary rough estimates, for instance, suggest it is conceivable that a single, small commercial pond could produce enough hydrogen gas to meet the weekly fuel needs of a dozen or so automobiles, Melis said.
The scientific team is just beginning to test ways to maximize hydrogen production, including varying the particular type of microalga used and its growth conditions.
Many energy experts believe hydrogen gas one day could become the world's best renewable source of energy and an environmentally friendly replacement for fossil fuels.
"Hydrogen is so clean burning that what comes out of the exhaust pipe is pure water," Melis said. "You can drink it."
Engineering advances for hydrogen storage, transportation and utilization, many sponsored by the U.S. DOE Hydrogen Program, are beginning to make the fuel feasible to power automobiles and buses and to generate electricity in this country, Seibert said.
"What has been lacking is a renewable source of hydrogen," he said.
For nearly 60 years, scientists have known that certain types of algae can produce the gas in this way, but only in trace amounts. Despite tinkering with the process, no one has been able to make the yield rise significantly without elaborate and costly procedures until the UC Berkeley and NREL teams made this discovery.
The breakthrough, Melis said, was discovering what he calls a "molecular switch." This is a process by which the cell's usual photosynthetic apparatus can be turned off at will and the cell can be directed to use stored energy with hydrogen as the byproduct.
"The switch is actually very simple to activate," Melis said. "It depends on the absence of an essential element, sulfur, from the microalga growth medium."
The absence of sulfur stops photosynthesis and thus halts the cell's internal production of oxygen. Without oxygen from any source, the anaerobic cells are not able to burn stored fuel in the usual way, through metabolic respiration. In order to survive, they are forced to activate the alternative metabolic pathway, which generates the hydrogen and may be universal in many types of algae.
"They're utilizing stored compounds and bleeding hydrogen just to survive," Melis said. "It's probably an ancient strategy that the organism developed to live in sulfur-poor anaerobic conditions."
He said the alga culture cannot live forever when it is switched over to hydrogen production, but that it can manage for a considerable period of time without negative effects.
The researchers first grow the alga "photosynthetically like every other plant on Earth," Melis said. This allows the green-colored microorganisms to collect sunlight and accumulate a generous supply of carbohydrates and other fuels.
When enough energy has been banked in this manner, the researchers tap it and turn it into hydrogen. To do this, they transfer the liquid alga culture, which resembles a lime-green soft drink, to stoppered one-liter glass bottles with no sulfur present. Then the culture is allowed to consume away all oxygen.
After about 24 hours, photosynthesis and normal metabolic respiration stop, and hydrogen begins to bubble to the top of the bottles and bleed off into tall, hydrogen-collection glass tubes.
"It was actually a surprise when we detected significant amounts of hydrogen coming out of the culture," Melis said. "We thought we would get trace amounts, but we got bulk amounts."
After up to four days of generating an hourly average of about three milliliters of hydrogen per liter of culture, the culture is depleted of stored fuel and must be allowed to return to photosynthesis. Then, two or three days later, it again can be tapped for hydrogen, Melis said.
"The cell culture can go back and forth like this many times," Ghirardi said.
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