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NASA: Now We Can Build Greenhouses on the Red Planet

The evidence of flowing water makes building greenhouses on Mars a very real possibility.

We've got the beverages, now what about the food?

On Monday, NASA revealed it now has the best evidence yet that there is liquid water on Mars. Actual flowing water on the surface of modern day Mars. This is exciting news for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which being that water is an important ingredient for life on Earth and, we assume, any potential life on Mars. But in a conference about the findings Monday morning, John M. Grunsfeld, NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, revealed another exciting possibility this finding has opened up: astronauts being able to grow food on Mars.

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"You'd have a challenge growing plants on the surface of Mars, even with some extreme genetic engineering," Grunsfeld said. "But certainly you could build inflatable or small greenhouses with higher pressure and if there's a lot of water on Mars, you could then use that water to grow plants inside the greenhouse. After all, there's plenty of carbon dioxide, which is what plants breathe to create oxygen."

Grunsfeld said a greenhouse on Mars could serve many functions, not just growing food to eat but also creating oxygen for astronauts to breathe. Growing plants outside of a greenhouse would be a much more difficult task, Grunsfeld said. Because the atmosphere is so thin, the surface of Mars is more like the top of a mountain on Earth than a lush green field.

"When you're in the verdant valleys of Nepal, you have wonderful plant life but as you go higher, that plant life sort of disappears til you only see lichens on rock," Grunsfeld explained. "And as you go a bit higher, all the plant life disappears. That's largely because the atmosphere gets so thin that any life would be desiccated, would lose its moisture."

But a greenhouse isn't a bad fallback plan, and now that there's strong evidence of flowing water on Mars, that plan could actually become a reality. There's still a lot of work to get done before we send humans to Mars, but you can trust that it's one of NASA's biggest targets. Grunsfeld called it "imperative" that we send astrobiologists to Mars in person and while growing our own life on Mars in the form of plants and crops will be an incredible milestone, he's got his sights set on an even bigger one.

"To explore the question—is there current day life on Mars?" he said.