Hello and welcome to this new community! :)

I want to ensure that the vision for mars stays a vibrant and colorful one, and you can’t have colors without visuals ;-)

Btw the words “vision” and “visual” have the same root, so the language already implies how important images are for our imag-ination.

This is why i want to start this blog with a series of images on food production. We all know it, we all love it: Food. It is the basis of our lifes, so it deserves special attention. Enjoy ;-)

On Mars, building greenhouses is a challenge. They are big and bulky and we would honestly like to avoid all complicated construction works, but we still need to eat. What to do? Algae to the rescue!

Algae are a type of organism that is typically unicellular (made of single cells) floating in the water, absorbing sunlight and turning it into useful biochemical energy.

The most well-known algae in the context of spaceflight is spirulina, a small bacterium that does photosynthesis (cyanobacteria). This is what this small dweller looks like:

(Image taken from Wikipedia) And this is what it will look like in dried, pressed form:

(Image also from Wikipedia)

Spirulina, when dried, is rather nutritious. 100g of it contain 290 kcal of energy, for comparison 100g of bread typically contain around 320 kcal. It is also very protein-rich, with 100g spirulina containing about 57g of protein.

(Data from Wikipedia)

See you next time!

All the text of this post was written by me. The header image was made with ChatGPT, all other images from Wikipedia.