Scientists Are Sending Cannabis Seeds To Space
The versatile cannabis plant could, some scientists think, one day be useful for lunar and Martian colonists. For now, researchers will subject its seeds to radiation in orbit and see what happens.
On Monday, June 23, shortly after 9 pm UTC, hundreds of seeds, fungi, algae, and human DNA samples, many of which have never been exposed to space before, will make their maiden voyage aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the mission is hoping to be the first to send plant tissues and seeds into a polar low Earth orbit and back, to allow scientists to study how biological systems are affected by the harsh levels of radiation found high above Earth’s poles. The information they glean, researchers hope, could one day help spacefarers grow crops on other planets.
The samples will travel in a small biological incubator called MayaSat-1, developed by the Genoplant Research Institute, a Slovenian aerospace company specializing in space-based biological research. At an altitude above 500 kilometers, the incubator, housed inside a larger capsule, will cross zones near the North and South poles where concentrations of charged particles emitted by the sun are high due to the Earth’s magnetic field. When it passes through these regions, it will be exposed to up to 100 times more radiation than objects orbiting at similar altitudes around the equator, like the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule will orbit Earth three times, in a mission lasting around three hours, before re-entering the atmosphere and splash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. If all goes to plan, the incubator will be collected from a location around nine hours off the coast of Hawaii and shipped back to Europe, where the real exploration will begin.
Among several research participants with samples aboard the mission is Božidar Radišič, who will be following the launch livestream closely from his office at the Research Nature Institute in Slovenia. The Martian Grow project, led by Radišič and his team, is sending approximately 150 cannabis seeds into space in MayaSat-1 to test their resilience and potentially accelerate their evolution. It’s not a gimmick, though, or a quest for an otherworldly high.
Having dedicated much of his working life to studying the cannabis plant, Radišič believes it is uniquely qualified for space agriculture. It grows fast, adapts well, and has been an agricultural crop for thousands of years. According to Radišič, if at some point we want to grow life on Mars, this makes it an ideal candidate. “Sooner or later, we will have lunar bases, and cannabis, with its versatility, is the ideal plant to supply those projects,” he tells WIRED. “It can be a source of food, protein, building materials, textiles, hemp, plastic, and medicine. I don’t think many other plants give us all these things.”
Read the full article at WIRED