Why are they using very outdated MH/HPI lamps I the green house? Even today on earth we are switching to more efficient and more durable LED grow lamps.
shareMaybe their film crew couldn't get a simple LED rig working. Or maybe they wanted to show the development of the station by successive crew members. But yeah they screwed up big time. Halogen bulbs (at that distance) are probably the least efficient way to produce crops, and after months of the dust storm they still hadn't rigged up the 'new LEDs' they mentioned - even after getting in the station commander's face about how they had to speed things along whether she liked it or not.
No wonder Richardson walked, their current setup seems to have been just 12 tables with one light each, that's nowhere near enough wattage to get anything but that pointless grass growing. If that wheat's the extent of their crops then next episode they'll be starving. If he thought his wheat was doing well under one tiny HPS he (and we) must have been hallucinating it. What they need, and what is actually being trialled in antarctica is vertical farming using layered shelves lit by slim LEDs. I'd be very surprised if wheat is ever grown on Mars for the vertical room it takes, we'd need to breed or modify dwarf varieties at the very least. More likely it would all be greens, root veg, dwarf tomatoes, berries and soya reconstituted from the organic waste disassembler... barf...
LEDs provide more light per area, use a fraction of the power of tubes so they wouldn't have had to leave him with one bulb - he was deprioritised to "one quarter power" not one... If I was him I'd have divorced the ice queen wife built some damned LED arrays and saved everyone else's lives and his own sanity with it. If you're sad then be useful, power was critical but they're all sitting round freezing when they could be improvising dynamos to make recharging bikes to stay warm AND feed the battery banks..
Also what is it with the French doc and that eye torch. Is she hoping to catch the reflection of a crazy person creeping up behind her with a knife or does she really think pupil dilation is a symptom of cabin fever? Or is she just looking for another hookup...
The answer is complicated it involves physics and an understanding of light and what is called the spectrum and a good educational system. This is something every high school graduate should know!
Just kidding....not really....
LED based plant grow lights emit a pinkish purple light that doesn't do well on camera.
It would have been fine to me if they would have used red or even white LED panels.
share"very outdated MH/HPI lamps I the green house"
Nonsense, they are standard greenhouse technology. You must be hippy pot grower!
Nothing beats the efficiency of HPS, which outputs lower energy red photons. Plants don't care. MH is slightly better than T8s and white LEDs, both 100 lm/W. LEDs main advantage is long-life and directional light.