UND Researchers and students are working to grow plants in space

GRAND FORKS, N.D. (KVRR) — Researchers and a pair of graduate students at the University of North Dakota are currently working with a Grand Forks company to shed a little Moonlight on plants in space.

SafetySpect and the team at UND were awarded $150,000 by NASA to research for the next six months.

The project, titled Moonlight, is working to develop a system that will allow plants to grow in outer space.

The modeled system will detect the plant’s growth, nutrients needed, stress, and goals of supporting the overall food production in the environment.

So far, they have been working on growing radishes and broccoli.

“Travel to space can be thought of not as a dream but as something that is actually achievable. And one important challenge in that is to be able to grow food in space. So that we have sustainable populations there in the habitat,” said Hossein Kashani Zadeh, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UND.

Within the next six months, the team hopes to bring their research into the inflatable lunar habitat at UND to test the system in a test space setting.