HMP Research Station | Haughton-Mars Project: Life to the Moon and Mars: Analogs for Space and Astrobiology (UF)

Science Report by Elaine Walker (EPO, Mars Institute)

Dr. Robert Ferl and Dr. Ana-Lisa Paul (UF)
copyright 2008 Mars Institute

The study of plants in space is usually associated with advanced life support systems. Dr. Robert Ferl and Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul, both faculty at the University of Florida, are studying the plants themselves, observing their biological reactions both in space environments and in microgravity environments such as NASA's C-9 jet, otherwise known as the "Vomet Comet".

Plants report more about their environment than humans and other animals do because they have to deal directly with their surroundings. Unlike animals, plants cannot get up and walk indoors when they experience environmental stress. They are equipped with genes that allow them to deal with a variety of stresses, as a result of their long evolutionary history in a particular environment.

When plants and other biological organisms are transfered into strange environments, such as microgravity or an extreme polar desert like Devon Island, scientists can observe whether they are acting erroneously to a new type of stress, or whether their reaction is appropriate. Plants can be equipped with with tools, such as a reporter gene that turns blue or glows green when it is under a certain kind of stress.

In studies that Robert and Anna-Lisa conducted in space environments, the plants reacted with novel gene expression patterns that indicated heat shock, among other things. It was not clear at first whether they were really hot, or experiencing another off nominal condition they were not equipped to deal with. This is how they decided to do more analog studies on plants in different strange environments, including parabolic microgravity flights and also on Devon Island with the Haughton-Mars Project.

Both the Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) Research Station on Devon Island and the parabolic flights on the C-9 jet have been valuable analog sites for a number of reasons. Both can be used for testing technologies for telemetric data collection from remote environments, and for the extensive preparation and testing that must be done before the science experiments board an orbital space flight.

Robert and Anna-Lisa also use the HMP Research Station as an analog environment in the study of how plants can utilize in-situ resources in strange environments. Plants could also possibly be engineered to not react erroneously to certain stresses. As one might expect, a very important goal with their research is to learn what it might take to enable plants to use the regolith as "soil" on the Moon or Mars.