Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Red Lab
Red Lab
In Red Lab we experiment with and validate the work done by Green Lab
Cartoon by Johanne Holm
In the gloomy dark cellar of the H.C.Ørstad Institute stands a mysterious and unearthly machine. "Unearthly" being an apt word to describe it, for the machine can be used to simulate the martian environment on Earth. The machine is called the "Martian Environmental Chamber" (MEC) and is able to simulate the following variables of a martian environment:
By placing the moss inside the MEC and changing one variable at a time we can test under which martian conditions moss can survive, and which conditions prove life threatening to the moss. You can read more about the MEC here.
However the one thing that we cannot use the MEC to test is temperature: this is because the MEC is unable to go below zero degrees while we need to simulate martian temperatures that go well below zero during the night. Thus we have designed our own experiment in order to test moss's ability to survive at different temperatures which is described here.
When the moss has been genetically modified to produce the anti-freeze protein, we want to test if this actually means that our moss is more resistant towards cold. To do this we had to build our completely own experiment from scratch:
Red lab temperature prototype