It’s a long, long way to Mars — so long, in fact, that astronauts making the estimated 2-1/2-year journey to and from the red planet wouldn’t be able to store all of the food they would need aboard their spacecraft.

What’s a hungry space adventurer to do?

Aleca Borsuk may have found at least one answer. With funding from the Hawai‘i NASA Space Grant Consortium, the University of Hawaii-Manoa student developed a technique to grow a nutritious leafy vegetable in a tight space, and larger and faster than normal using strategically placed, energy-efficient lighting.

“I was focused on squeezing every last inch of space and every last watt of electricity,” Borsuk said Feb. 17. She is a mechanical engineering student from the San Francisco Bay Area who is finishing up her undergraduate degree.

Borsuk presented her research at both the Hawai‘i Space Grant Consortium Spring 2016 Fellowship and Traineeship Symposium and the 2016 American Society for Horticultural Science Conference in Florida.

The effort, guided by mentor UH-Manoa Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences associate professor Kent Kobayashi, isn’t the only research at UH Manoa that could play a role in NASA’s goal to travel to Mars by the 2030s.

The university’s “Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, has been researching how teams of astronauts will perform together on long-duration space exploration missions. Crew members in the NASA-funded project have spent up to a year isolated in a dome located in a remote Mars-like area of Hawaii island,” the university said in a news release.

NASA estimates a spaceship would take about six months to travel to Mars with another six months to return home. In between, the mission would have to stay on Mars for up to 20 months before the planets realign for a return trip. That’s a total of 2-1/2 years or so.

Ideally, the diet of an astronaut on such a long-duration mission would be healthy and tasty while requiring a minimum of cost, effort and energy to grow and harvest.

For her study, Borsuk chose a hardy, heat- and drought-tolerant species of edible vegetable known as amaranth, an ancient grain that once was a staple food of the Aztecs.

“The leaves are beautiful,” she remarked, adding that the taste isn’t bad either — a cross between spinach and kale, “only with a bit more bite.”

During her semester-long experiments, she found that if she included not only overhead lighting, but also energy-efficient LEDs interspersed amid the leaves and greenery, the plants would grow bigger and faster.

Growing such a plant in space would have more benefit than the obvious food and nutritional values, she said. Among them: The leafy plant produces oxygen that would improve the artificial environment aboard a spacecraft.

“And if you can imagine being away from Earth for many years, you know tending something that’s green would have a psychological boost as well,” Borsuk said.

Borsuk said she’s happy with her research, but she conceded more study is needed to determine whether amaranth is the best plant species for a long spaceflight. But it well could be. All parts of the plant are edible, it’s extremely easy to grow and the seeds are small and economical, she said.

Borsuk, who is minoring in botany, plans to go on to graduate school to study botany.

“I’m inspired by nature and the evolution and adaption of organisms and especially plants,” she said.