NASA and Peru Actually Tried Growing Potatoes on Mars — Here's What Happened

This isn't a thought experiment or a movie plot. In February 2016, a real potato tuber was planted inside a sealed, engineered box in a laboratory in Lima, Peru, built to simulate conditions on Mars as closely as anyone on Earth could manage — and NASA was directly involved in designing it.

The experiment was a partnership between NASA's Ames Research Center in California and the International Potato Center (CIP), the Lima-based research institution that holds the world's largest potato genetic collection (covered in more depth elsewhere on this site). Engineers from the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) in Lima built a sealed CubeSat-style containment environment, working from NASA's own designs and technical guidance, rigged with pumps, water hoses, LED lighting, and instrumentation capable of replicating Mars' atmosphere (dominated by carbon dioxide, unlike Earth's nitrogen-oxygen mix), its day/night temperature swings, its air pressure, and — critically — its punishing level of surface ultraviolet radiation, which Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field mostly shield us from.

Soil was the other half of the problem, and CIP didn't improvise it. Scientists transported soil from La Joya Pampas, a region of the Atacama Desert in southern Peru so dry it's often cited as one of the driest places on Earth — and its mineral composition and structure closely resemble actual Martian regolith. That soil was used largely on its own, though blended in some cases with fertilized Earth soil to provide baseline nutrition and structure the Mars-analog soil couldn't offer alone.

Phase Two of the experiment began on February 14, 2016, with a tuber planted directly into the CubeSat environment. By March 2017, CIP reported positive preliminary results: potatoes demonstrated they could grow in the dry, salty, Mars-analog soil conditions, at least with some assistance from blended Earth soil. It wasn't a full agricultural success story — nobody was harvesting a Martian potato crop — but it was genuine proof-of-concept that the crop could tolerate conditions substantially harsher than anything found in mainstream terrestrial agriculture.

The research team itself reflected how seriously this was taken as science rather than publicity: alongside CIP's agricultural researchers, the project involved NASA-affiliated planetary scientists and astrobiologists — genuinely cross-disciplinary, combining space science with crop science in a way that's rare outside a project with real institutional backing on both sides.

Here's the part that gets lost when this story gets told as a novelty: CIP was explicit that the project had two purposes from the start, and the second one mattered more in the near term than actual Mars colonization ever could. A crop that survives Mars-analog conditions — extreme dryness, high salinity, poor soil structure, radiation exposure — is, by definition, a crop with exactly the resilience traits needed for the driest, most degraded, most climate-stressed farmland already in production right now, in places already living through water scarcity and soil salinity as a daily reality rather than a hypothetical.

That framing lines up with everything else CIP does. This is an institution whose entire genetic collection exists because potato's wild Andean relatives evolved to survive extreme highland conditions — frost, drought, poor soils, altitude — over thousands of years, long before anyone thought to test them against a simulated Martian atmosphere. The Mars experiment wasn't a departure from CIP's mission. It was a new, more dramatic way of asking the same question CIP has always asked: how far can this crop's genetic diversity actually be pushed, and what does that resilience make possible for the people who need it most, here on Earth.

A real NASA-Peru research collaboration spent two years testing whether one of the world's most important staple crops could grow under conditions engineered to match another planet — and got a genuinely positive answer. Whether or not anyone ever actually grows a potato on Mars, the more immediate payoff is already here: a stronger scientific case for potato's viability on the hardest, driest, most marginal land Earth's changing climate keeps producing more of.