 and welcome back from break now before we get into our interview with the real Martian Gardener we first would like to once again thank our tomorrow premier members for their support on our patreon at patreon.com slash tmro but wait there's more we also have our tomorrow producers these folks they have they give us anywhere from $5 to $9.99 per episode and they get access to our show immediately they get early access to after dark I believe they also get free shipping from our swag store right so so they so you get a lot of good stuff even if you are a tomorrow producer as well and of course we love everybody who helps us out and if you would like to help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow you can go head on over to patreon.com slash tmro now we have got our guest who I've been eagerly awaiting talking about this because this is just such a cool project we have Mark Cusimano and Mark we're very glad to have you on the show today well thank you Jared I'm really excited to be here been a fan of the show for a long time and it's really exciting to actually be a guest on tomorrow all right so you run a website called the Martian Gardener which is a project that you have been doing on your own so just go ahead and tell us what is the Martian Gardener so the Martian Garden is a line of desktop garden kits and other products that include a product called Mars Regolith Simulant. What Mars Regolith Simulant is it's actually a blend of earth materials that gets about as close as we can to the chemical and grain size of the soil also known as regolith that we find on the surface of Mars. Now you guys actually started out as a Kickstarter project if we're remembering correctly so could you tell us a little bit about how you ended up sort of getting this project going what was what was sort of the inspiration to make this. So for the inspiration for us we really have been trying to find some way to engage with particularly the amateur science community the citizen science community makers in a way that can help people get involved in space in ways other than kind of the traditional hobbies like you know amateur astronomy and high power rocketry and things like that we wanted to try to add something new to that kind of a lineup and with the Martian Garden we're hoping that we can provide citizen scientists and students with students with not only an interesting way to get engaged in space exploration and astronomy but maybe provide amateurs with the means that they have that they need to develop the technologies and the techniques that we're going to need on the journey to Mars. Now Mars regolith is not something that we end up you know put grabbing from Mars is bringing it back because we haven't done a sample return with any mission to Mars yet so you we kind of talked before the show that there's a real cool story about how you guys were able to make Martian regolith so how do you guys actually make the regolith to sim that sort of simulated Mars regolith. So that's a really awesome story I think that the story for Mars regolith simulant really starts at the beginning of the solar system when the when the sun first formed and we still had the protoplanetary disk and the planets were coalescent the inner planets the terrestrial planets Mercury Venus Earth and Mars all formed in a very similar way because they were pretty close to each other and in the protoplanetary disk the heavier elements like for example iron silicates oxides were pulled in close to the Sun due to their relative weight compared to say hydrogen and helium this is why we see terrestrial planets instead of gas giant planets when we move closer to the Sun and that was an important thing because that means that Mars in Earth formed relatively in the same way and from the same basic pool of materials. Now on Mars it seems like Mars was smaller so when it was a molten ball just kind of coalescing in the early solar system it had a little bit less iron than Earth did and a little bit less iron than Venus and Mercury and so forth but since it was smaller and it didn't heat up quite to the same extent that Earth did this iron was kind of locked into the crust of Mars because it never liquefied all the way it never precipitated down to the core the way it did on Earth. As Mars cooled this resulted in a much higher iron concentration on the surface than what we find on Earth and of course this is what results in Mars red color today. Now after Mars had formed of course the early Martian environment was much warmer and wetter than modern Mars as we observed today and water was one of the big erosion factors when it still was wet you can see that in Valles Marineris you can see that in the River deltas you can see that in the many signs of water erosion that are across planet but one big difference is between Earth and Mars is that Mars didn't have a way to recycle its crust the way that Earth did with plate tectonics so we find a very ancient surface on Mars that's been eroded for a very long time covering the planet with this kind of iron-rich igneous dust and by using what we know about the geology of Mars and the geology of Earth we can compare the kind of chemistry that missions have found on the surface of Mars with things that we know about Earth and find really close analogs to it. Alright so we've got some really great questions coming from our chat room and some of them are very technical I guess is the best way to put them. So there's a there's a very big group of people that are wanting to know what sort of like what the mineral content is because we know we find things like perchlorates on the surface of Mars and a couple people specifically asked if there are things like perchlorates in the simulated regolith that you guys are selling. So we have made the decision not to do any kind of perchlorate additives and of course that's a recent discovery from the surface of Mars that there are perchlorates in the soil and that has some big implications for growing plants on Mars because the perchlorates are taken up by the plants and they accumulate in the vegetative growth. It's something that we have to find a solution to if we're actually going to grow crops on Mars. However perchlorates have some pretty significant health hazards. They've been implicated in thyroid problems and we're not equipped to either handle or ship those kind of hazardous substances. So what we've elected to do is for advanced amateurs who want to add you know perchlorates additional iron oxides and things like that to the soil that's that's where we'd like to see that happening. Now to address the questions about the actual composition of it the biggest difference between Mars regolith simulants and the measured properties of the surface of Mars by the various surface missions there the biggest difference is going to be in the ratio of aluminum oxides to iron oxides. In particular materials on earth are going to have much higher concentrations or relative concentrations of aluminum oxides while materials from Mars are going to have a much higher concentration of iron oxides and of course red that's that's where we're seeing that. Now there are some other small differences for example I want to say that Mars has a higher concentration of sulfates as well. These kind of trace elements are rarely more than a five to ten percent difference by far the biggest difference is going to be in the relative concentrations of aluminum and iron oxides. So just a question from our chat room kind of kind of putting a couple questions together and then paraphrasing it kind of what's the difference between your simulated regolith and some of the stuff that NASA like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory may work with with their simulated regolith like when they're working on their rovers like when they were trying to figure out how to free spirit and they were using their versions of simulated Martian regolith sort of what's the difference between yours and what NASA may be using. Sure that's actually kind of chapter two of our Mars regolith story. When we set out to do this we really relied on research from NASA and the JPL to guide us in the right direction and in particular these are guys who have landed on Mars they know more about its surface composition than we do so we started to follow the tracks that NASA had put out with their publicly published articles and the first place we arrived was at a product called JSC Mars One. JSC Mars One was developed at Johnson Space Center in the 90s based on lessons learned both from the Viking landers and from the Pathfinder mission with its sojourner rover. Prior to that there wasn't much data about the actual composition of the surface of Mars but in the development and the deployment of the Mars exploration rovers of spirit and opportunity they developed something called JSC Mars One and this is a material that comes from a cinder cone in Hawaii called Ku'un'en and it's in the saddle right between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. This is a material that's formed from a basaltic magma or basaltic lava that cools rapidly in the presence of water it creates a very almost like a volcanic glass and obsidian ash and in the 90s NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory obtained a quantity of this JSC One but while they were doing development work for the Mars Phoenix lander which of course is the one that landed in the polar regions with the scoop to look for permafrost below the Martian soil they found that JSC One had some rather unfortunate characteristics with regards to how it absorbed water. In particular they were studying how water ice sublimates directly into water vapor in ambient Mars conditions and they found that JSC One had a tendency to form kind of a clay so they decided to develop something new called Mojave Mars Simulant and Mojave Mars Simulant is very different in one important aspect which is the shape of the grains since JSC One was eroded naturally it had a very round grain shape but MMS Mojave Mars Simulant has been mechanically crushed and this gives a much more sharp angular shape and makes it a lot more difficult for the material to absorb water and become a clay. So they used this in the development of I believe Phoenix Curiosity and the upcoming 2020 Rover I believe and they obtained it from a company called Carlton Global Resources. Unfortunately they went out of business but we were able to identify the company that currently operates the site where JPL obtained their Mojave Mars Simulant and we can say at this point with X marks the spot confidence that we are obtaining our supply from the exact same quarry and the same rock deposits that JPL used to obtain MMS. Very, very cool. So just a little introduction we actually you sent us a kit one of your gardener kits and can you tell us what's in the actual kit itself? Sure. So I've actually got one here handy. The basic kit is a small dome and open it up and you find inside some Mars Simulant material. There we go. And a couple of little planties. Basically the primary components of the kit are the garden dome itself, a small sheet of root blocking material because it's very fine grain stuff. You don't want it falling through the drain holes. Yes. So you'll put a little piece of blocker material at the bottom. You fill it up with the included Mars Regolith Simulant. Water it down a little bit because this stuff is very dusty. The first time that you use it, it actually floats around like a talcum powder or a baking powder or something. But after that, it's it acts very much like a really rich volcanic soil. And the propagator dome that's included with it kind of helps to keep the humidity in for the seedlings. Because what we've found is that because it's it's a volcanic soil, it drains relatively quickly. Water evaporates from it relatively quickly. And it's a good idea to retain it for the seedlings. So kind of combining some questions together that we have, obviously our our viewers are very excited about this. And they're they're all almost universally asking how well do plants grow. But also from Tarantula, one of our viewers, they also want to know personally, what has what plant has had the most success so far that you've seen in growing in this kit? So so far, the plants seem to be doing really well. In general, the Regolith Simulant behaves like a soil that's very rich in inorganic nutrients, and very poor inorganic nutrients. So for many of your viewers, I'm sure I've seen the Martian, you do need to add some sort of an organic nutrient supply, whether that's freeze dried poop or not. And in terms of which plants have been growing the best so far, we've had the best luck with backyard weeds, just weeds from our yard. They're very resilient to all sorts of stresses. And for the amount of manipulation that we've been doing with the soil as we fix the prototype and stuff, we found that they were very forgiving little plants. In terms of our next round of plants, I think that basil is probably going to be the species that we try next. Okay. And was there really much of a performance difference between Earth soil and Martian Regolith when you were growing the plants? Not once we had added some organic nutrients. Before that, what we found was there was a lot of yellowing in the leaves. And what was happening there is that there were I'm sure some people are familiar with the NPK blend in a fertilizer that's nitrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. And there wasn't a lot of that in the soil at first. And so what we defined is that the lower leaves on the plants would turn yellow. And what was happening was the plants were actually taking nitrogen from their older growth to support newer growth. Once we added a proper NPK blend to the soil, that stopped and they've been really thriving. Because with the abundance of the inorganic nutrients that the soil offers just giving it a little bit of organic nutrients really makes it take off. All right. And, you know, we've we like I said, we've got our own kit right here that you sent us. And we're really looking forward to taking this out. And we're probably going to hand it off to my mom, who I was I was talking earlier as a florist. And we're going to see what she can grow with it. And we'll definitely make sure to give you the results and let you know, looking forward to it. Yeah, we can let you know what would be some nice beautiful flowers, potentially to grow on there. But also with the kit, what seeds come with the kit? Is there is there a specific set of seeds that come with it? Right now, we're leaning towards the Arabidopsis species, also known as the mustard plant. The reason that we're selecting this is because Arabidopsis is a model organism in biology. There's a huge abundance of research that's been conducted with the mustard plant. So that people if they do decide to share what they learn with the Martian garden, that they're going to be talking a similar language to professional botanists. And then we're also probably going to include a variety of just kitchen herbs, basil, parsley, oregano, that kind of stuff. They're very cool. And of course, if anybody who's watching this wants to actually get their own Martian garden kit, how should they go about doing that? So the easiest way is probably to go to our website, which is www.themartiangarden.com. We are currently running our Kickstarter and the goal for our Kickstarter is set just to achieve the minimum order quantity from our suppliers and then to go out there and get it. The supplier Rio Tinto Minerals is being really awesome and they're letting us go out and use this query that they acquired from Carlton Global Resources and the only catch is that we've got to go get the material ourselves. So if we're able to successfully fund our Kickstarter, we're going to have the funds we need to both purchase the material and go out there and get it and process it. And for that, we'll be just offering direct sales on the website. All right. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show today and telling us about how people can become their own backyard Watanies at home. And we're so looking forward to seeing what you guys do with this, seeing if you guys maybe expand it sometime in the future. And of course, great. Best of luck to you on the Kickstarter, which I know it seems to be going pretty good so far. It's going all right. I just want to say, Jared, thanks again for the opportunity to come on the show. This was a real honor to be on tomorrow. All right. Well, thank you, Mark, once again for coming on the show and especially for sending us this, our own kit, and we're going to really have a lot of fun working with it.