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Planning for life on Mars

Rebeca Gonçalves explains how plant food could be grown on the red planet.
By
  1. Raveena Bhambra

    1. Raveena Bhambra is a senior editor at BioPharma Dealmakers in London.

Rebecca Gonçalves in a greenhouse with 100 kilos of regolith soil from Mars.

Rebeca Gonçalves is an astrobiologist consultant to the Brazilian Space Agency for its projects on space agricultural systems and is based in São Paulo. Credit: Rebecca Gonçalves

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“The day this photo was taken, in November 2021, I got the best of presents. One hundred kilograms of material designed to simulate Mars regolith, the dense, soil-like deposits present on the planet’s surface, arrived from Austin, Texas, at the Wageningen University laboratory in the Netherlands, where I was then working. Mars has no nutrients or organic matter, so there’s no real soil in its regolith. The simulant I received had been developed by NASA researchers on the basis of data retrieved and analysed by rovers that have visited the red planet.

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Nature 634, 746 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03345-x

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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