Conceptual Design of an Automated Irrigation and Fixation System for Long-Term Crop Care of Cherry Tomatoes for Applications in Microgravity Machines

Currently, colonizing space is the next step for humanity. However, it has many challenges to be completed before reaching this goal. Thus, multiple fields of study have been developed to solve some of the problems to live out on Earth such as a source of renewable food. For this reason, the Center for Space Emerging Technologies (C-SET) has been working on projects to contribute to the research of this task with this project, which is an automatized cultivation system to study the effect of simulated microgravity in plants with the highest precision reducing human intervention or error. In addition, many parts of this system can be easily made by current technologies like 3D printers or CNC machines. This project presents a conceptual design of the system focusing on water storage, selective irrigation, and improvement of the simulation (fixing system), besides the parts designed are the simplest to give good maintenance. This system is pretended to be applied to cherry tomatoes to analyze the correct functionating of the machine in simulated microgravity at the same time that biological assays will be done to the sample as a part of a complete project. In conclusion, if favorable results were achieved; consequently, the next step of this project is to reduce the human intervention with camera sensors to record the times of growth, flowering, and fruit ripening, at the same time, developing and improving the method to refill the water container.