Nitrogen accountancy in space agriculture

Area of Science:

• Space exploration
• Biotechnology
• Astroagriculture

Background:

• Food production and pharmaceutical synthesis are key biotechnologies for space exploration.
• Scalable, modular agriculture in closed-loop systems offers advantages over traditional methods for space missions.
• Current evaluation models for space agriculture systems have limitations, lacking comprehensive analyses and consideration of multiple crop varieties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To expand space agriculture modeling to include nitrogen dependence for various crops.
• To address limitations in current models by incorporating a critical nutrient.
• To enhance the accuracy and applicability of models for long-duration space missions.

Main Methods:

• Developed an expanded space agriculture model accounting for nitrogen dependence across multiple crops.
• Utilized experimental fitting to determine model parameters.
• Performed sensitivity analysis to identify key influential parameters.

Main Results:

• The expanded model successfully incorporates nitrogen limitations for diverse crop cultivation.
• Model parameters were validated through experimental fitting.
• Sensitivity analysis identified critical parameters for future research and development.

Conclusions:

• Accounting for nitrogen dependence improves the robustness of space agriculture models.
• The enhanced model provides a more comprehensive framework for evaluating space-based food production systems.
• This work supports the development of more reliable and sustainable food sources for human space exploration.