Building an Ecosystem to Grow Crops on Mars

In the 2015 science fiction film The Martian, an astronaut played by Matt Damon is presumed dead and left behind on Mars by his fellow astronauts, but—in an unlikely and entertaining sequence of events—manages to survive until his eventual rescue. One of the keys to his survival is his ability to feed himself by cultivating a potato crop fertilized with human waste. The movie’s plot is not as far-fetched as one might think; scientists at Wageningen University & Research in …