Greenhouses in extreme environments: The Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse design and operation overview

Future food-production systems: vertical farming and controlled-environment agriculture

“…In putting forth his pioneering conception, Despommier outlined a number of reasons why vertical farming could be highly attractive to policy makers: all-year-round crop production; higher yields (by a factor of six or more depending on the crop), avoidance of droughts, floods, and pests; water recycling; ecosystem restoration; reduction of pathogens; provision of energy to the grid through methane generation from compost; reduction in use of fossil fuels (no tractors, farm machinery, or shipping), and creation of new jobs. The closed environment could conceivably be also suitable for translation to other planetary environments in the context of space exploration (Giroux et al 2006).…”

Deployment of a Fully-Automated Green Fluorescent Protein Imaging System in a High Arctic Autonomous Greenhouse

“…By examining the data collected by the greenhouse sensors of the previous year, it indicated that the 24 VDC unregulated line varies between ∼23.5 V to peaks of ∼33 V. The imager hardware was examined to study the possibility of modifying parts not capable of withstanding the high voltage peaks. The cFP-2120 controller data sheet indicated that the power supply range was 11–30 VDC and since similar controllers were used from the beginning of the greenhouse deployment in 2002 [16], it was concluded that it was safe to use the unregulated 24 VDC line on the TIS-III controller. The NI-1744 camera data sheet specified that the smart camera accepted power within the range of the industry standard IEC 1311 input power specification (24 V + 20% – 15% with an additional allowance for an AC peak of + 5%), at 33 V (short and infrequent peaks), it's slightly above that specified by the manufacturer.…”

“…From 10 July to 24 September low resolution images were collected and transferred via the greenhouse satellite connection to Simon Fraser University. During this period, the greenhouse operated in its nominal fall operations mode where only the fall crop trays were watered (spring crop trays were inactive) [16]. Figure 11 shows a set of images taken during the fall run from 11 July to 15 August, when the plants are in full growth and with a chosen interval of five days between images to better visualize the demonstrated growth.…”

“…On the other hand, it supports extreme environment related scientific and operational research, providing an improved understanding of how remote and semi-autonomous plant production systems could one day be operated. The ACMG is composed of a DC power system, plant growth system, environmental control system, local network, communication system, data acquisition and control system [15,16]. The greenhouse operates autonomously throughout the year, with the researchers only on-site during the month of July when the crops are harvested and reseeded [20].…”

“…The information collected by the controllers, sensors and cameras is accessed by an independent embedded Linux command and control computer and sent via satellite to an autonomous mission operations computer server system at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Upon reception of the data, the information is processed and stored, and then made available to the researchers through the Internet [16]. The autonomous mission operations server at SFU can determine failure modes from received data and provide basic autonomous commanding via satellite to the embedded computer in the ACMG, which can further command the controllers, and/or power distribution system.…”