FarmBot + NASA Collaboration

Hi FarmBot community,

This week our entire core team is visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We’re here to meet with NASA scientists and engineers and other open source food groups from the MIT Open Ag Initiative, New Harvest Group, Fairchild Gardens, and FIT, to brainstorm how we might grow food in space, on the moon, and Mars using technologies such as FarmBot!

Pictured here is our team with the v1.2 FarmBot Genesis device in one of the labs at the Space Station Processing Facility. Fun fact: this is also the first time our entire team has met each other in-person!

It is very exciting to see how our open source work and all of the ideas and momentum from this community are catching the attention of organizations as prominent as NASA. It might not be too long before we see some pictures come back of the first FarmBot grown veggies on the red planet!

Next week we’ll post a more in-depth blog post with many more photos from our visit. We’ve also brought our documentary film maker along who is going to make a video of the event, specifically highlighting how open source communities can come together to solve big challenges.

In the meantime, here are a few more photos from today’s activities:

The Space Station Processing Facility - where every component of the International Space Station has gone through!

Brainstorming session

The program

The Veggie system that NASA currently uses to grow plants in the ISS

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Neat.

So cool!

Is there anything you can provide about what work NASA is doing and what the topics were? I would give anything to be a fly on the wall in that room or see what was presented.

We have a big 'ol blog post that we’ll post soon once the video of the event is finished up!

Please see this post for a mini documentary of the event: FarmBot Stories: Brainstorming Innovative Open-Source Approaches to Food Production with NASA

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This is freakin awesome!!! FarmBot and NASA coming together!

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