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Menu on the way to Mars

RIA Novosti

June 16 (RIA Novosti) -

MOSCOW (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) - What will cosmonauts eat on the way to Mars? Nobody doubts that man will some day fly to Mars. The journey should take about 700 days, but no one knows when this will happen.

Optimists believe the launch of the first manned mission to Mars will come in 2017-2018, when the nearest favorable "ballistic window" for the flight opens.

Pessimists consider this prospect unrealistic, both from a technical standpoint (it is necessary to build a spaceship and its engines, and then set a "mastodon" weighing 300-500 metric tons on the trajectory of the flight to Mars) and from the medical-biological standpoint (crew preparation for the long flight).

The 438-day orbital mission on board the Mir station conducted at the end of the 20th century by a cosmonaut with medical background, Valery Polyakov, marked one of the initial stages of such preparations. The mission proved there were no fundamental medical or biological limitations for such a long flight.

Another aspect is nutrition. Presumably, every detail has been worked out in that respect. The crew will have vacuum-dried products as their main diet. All you need is to add some water, heat it up, and a meal is ready. In addition, cosmonauts will have some canned food (meat and fish), juices in plastic bags, and specially treated bread. Nevertheless, the rations will have to be more diverse.

The idea to take birds on board (probably quails) to provide cosmonauts with fresh eggs was discarded. The experiments showed newly born birds could not adapt to zero gravity. Fish and shellfish were easier to deal with. The first experiments showed promising results - they are able to reproduce in space, although their growth rate is slow.

What is obvious even today is that the spaceship will have a greenhouse. Ten years ago, scientists were not sure whether it was possible to grow regular plants in space. Today, cosmonauts on board the International Space Station, taking turns to look after the greenhouse, are growing the fourth space generation of peas.

The scientists calculated that in order to provide a crewmember with plant part of the ration (vegetables, greens and cereals), it is necessary to build a greenhouse with an area of 15-20 square meters. The conditions of the flight to Mars should allow the crew to have one or two small racks, which means the optimum choice of plants for the greenhouse is very important.

When it comes to their greens, Russian cosmonauts prefer dill, parsley, and leafy salad. The Japanese, Chinese and Koreans favor various kinds of lettuce. Four kinds of lettuce, the fastest growing and requiring the least care, were chosen from a great variety of these greens.

Cosmonauts grew them in orbit, tasted and, literally, rejoiced. Five or six varieties of greens will be most probably recommended for cultivation and nutrition. Not only are they good for health and contain many minerals and fiber. They also create a pleasant environment and have a positive emotional impact on cosmonauts.

During radio communication sessions, the cosmonauts tend to describe at length, for example, how the wheatears stir in the airflow from ventilators - they feel as if they were in the middle of a wheat field on Earth swept by the wind.

Current experiments on board the ISS will show whether the plant genotype changes during a long space flight and whether these changes will have a negative effect on cosmonauts' health; whether the plants will die, or turn into "dwarfs" or, on the contrary, will grow larger due to higher levels of radiation.

A special family of peas, whose genotype is well known to scientists, has been chosen for the experiment. Cosmonauts have grown four consecutive generations of these plants. So far, the experiment has been successful and no changes of the genotype have been found.

The experts have to solve another important problem. They need to determine how much water is needed for the flight. They calculated that every crewmember would need about 2.5 liters of water every day, which means the spaceship will have to carry several tons of water. Part of it must pass through regeneration, purification and disinfectant systems, return into circulation, and be re-used for various purposes.

Ideally, the spaceship should have its own biosphere, a closed ecological system with a full cycle of matter. It is also important to ensure the existence of numerous back-up systems for all life support modules and to create a sufficient reserve capacity for them.

There are other issues the organizers of the mission will have to deal with for the first time. A seemingly unimportant one among them is how the cosmonauts will get rid of their litter? There will be no cargo ships that currently remove all garbage from the ISS and carry it down to earth to be later downed in the ocean. Littering Mars is certainly out of the question.

Scientists fear the possibility of bringing life forms contained in the litter to another planet. There are still various theories about the emergence of life on Earth. It is possible it started with simple life forms brought from outer space.

The present conditions on Mars are much more favorable for the evolution of life than they were on Earth eons ago. In particular, the existence of large water reservoirs has been confirmed. If life forms from the Earth somehow end up on Mars, they might start reproducing and interfere with natural course of its evolution. Unless, of course, these life forms have already been left on the planet by unmanned Mars probes.

Will in dozens or hundreds of millions of years, Martians ponder, as the inhabitants of the Earth do today, where life on their planet came from?

Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the Institute for Space Studies