Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Henninger, Donald.
Nutrients contained in sandlike material. Artificial soil provides nutrients to plants during several growing seasons without need to add fertilizer or nutrient solution. When watered, artificial soil slowly releases all materials a plant needs to grow. Developed as medium for growing crops in space. Also used to grow plants on Earth under controlled conditions or even to augment natural soil.
By growing higher plants for food, lunar and Martian manned habitats will not only reduce resupply requirements but obtain CO2 removal and both oxygen-production and water-reclamation requirements. Plants have been grown in the RLSS at NASA-Johnson in order to quantitatively evaluate plant CO2 accumulation, O2 generation, evapotranspiration, trace-contaminant generation, and biomass productivity. Attention is presently given to test conditions and anomalies in these RLSS trials; areas where performance must be improved have been identified.