Dolores Beasley<br />Headquarters, Washington January 9, 2004<br />(Phone: 202/358-1753)<br /><br /><br />Tracy Young<br />Kennedy Space Center, Fla.<br />(Phone: 321/867-2468)<br /><br /><br />RELEASE: 04-018<br /><br /><br />NASA RESEARCH ENHANCES BENEFITS OF PLANT EXPERIMENTS<br /><br /><br /> NASA-funded scientists are researching methods to <br />address current issues and future needs for efficiently <br />growing plants on Mars.<br /><br /><br />The research is being conducted in the specialized low-<br />pressure and Mars-simulation chambers at the new state-of-<br />the-art Space Life Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Kennedy <br />Space Center (KSC), Fla.<br /><br /><br />The research data, featured on the cover of the January 2004 <br />issue of the scientific journal Plant Physiology, focuses on <br />using reduced pressure environments to increase the <br />scientific and engineering benefits of plant growth <br />experiments. The data indicates, with the currently available <br />materials on Mars, a greenhouse structure could only be <br />constructed if the internal pressure of the greenhouse was <br />maintained below approximately one-sixteenth of Earth's <br />atmospheric pressure.<br /><br /><br />"Since extraterrestrial colonies and space vehicles may well <br />employ reduced atmospheric pressures to lower the time and <br />engineering costs of missions, we now have the beginnings of <br />an understanding of how those atmospheres will impact our <br />long-term life support system," said Robert Ferl, director, <br />Space Agriculture Biotechnology Research and Education, <br />University of Florida, Gainesville.<br /><br /><br />Ferl is principal investigator for the project and author of <br />the featured paper "Hypobaric Biology. Arabidopsis Gene <br />Expression at Low Atmospheric Pressure." Research team <br />members and co-authors include Anna-Lisa Paul and Mick Popp, <br />University of Florida; and Andrew Schuerger, Dynamac Corp., <br />KSC. For more information on space research, visit:<br /><br /><br />http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov