Performance of Sweetpotato for Bioregenerative Life Support

Introduction Sweetpotato (Hill et al. 1992) was grown to harvest maturity within NASA Johnson Space Center's Variable Pressure Growth Chamber (Barta and Henninger 1996) to characterize crop performance for potential use in advanced life support systems as a contributor to food production, air revitalization and resource recovery. Characterization of crop performance on a large-scale in closed atmosphere chambers is essential to advance the readiness level of crop plants as candidate biotechnologies for advanced life support (Wheeler and Strayer 1997). Data obtained from this research will be useful for systems modeling and analysis in support of development of biomass production systems for the Bioregenerative Planetary Life Support Systems Test Complex (Barta et al. 1999) as a stepping stone to the development of technologies for long duration human exploration of space.