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EDEN ISS is a European project to investigate cultivation techniques of plants in space for future bio-regenerative life support systems. The technologies will be tested in a laboratory environment as well as at the highly-isolated German Antarctic Neumayer Station III. A small and mobile container-sized test facility will be built in order to prov...
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... limit, dictated by constraints in the logistics chain, is 10000 kg per MTF container. Table 3 shows estimated values for the equipment dry mass (without fluids, humans, plants, etc.) and for the spare parts and consumables. The mass values are afflicted by high uncertainties at the current state of the design. ...
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... This prototype is called the EDEN ISS Mobile Test Facility (MTF) and was funded by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 program. Detailed information about the EDEN ISS MTF can be found in chapter 3.1 and in references [3] and [4]. After successfully completing the set objectives of the EDEN ISS MTF a next phase was heralded. ...
... 4 shows the interfaces of the AMS components among each other, with other subsystems, with the habitat, and with the crew. Main focus is on the interfaces of the AMS components with other subsystems. ...
Main goal of this thesis was to develop a first design of the atmosphere management system (AMS). This includes the sizing of the different components and the proof of feasibility concerning the required dimensions of the components compared to the available space in the module. Therefor, requirements regarding the supportive external infrastructure, the overall greenhouse module, and the AMS were identified. In addition, assumptions for the implementation of the AMS were defined. After a detailed systems analysis including the single components, their interrelations, the required interfaces, the occurring internal and external loads, and the definition of system boundaries, a system strategy was developed. Although the AMS of the MTF was completely redesigned for the operation in space conditions some adoptions could be made. Also during the design proceeding, particularly at the dimensioning process of the single components, some practices adopted from the MTF could be applied. The final outcome is a modular concept with the following components. Air circulation generated by fans guarantees a continuous air movement within the cultivation area and counteracts air pockets with the help of a duct system. This loop of cycling air forces the warm, humid, and VOC (volatile organic compound) enriched atmosphere of the cultivation area through the duct system equipped with a sequence of air treating units. After mechanically removing particles with a pre- and HEPA-filter, a condensing heat exchanger (CHX) dehumidifies the air and a heater unit tempers the cold air again. Afterwards trace contaminants are chemically eliminated by a VOC-filter. Finally, the air composition control regulates the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentration.
... Crop selection methodology was developed by Wageningen University and Research experts in terrestrial greenhouse cultivation [3]. The crops were grown in climate rooms to define the optimal light recipes (spectral quality, light intensity, and photoperiod), to optimize the nutrients and water use to check the cultivation and management of crops [4] and top-level suitable crops were listed in Table 1 [3,4] . Choosing crops for cultivation in space, Space missions require bio-regenerative life-support systems. ...
... Crop selection methodology was developed by Wageningen University and Research experts in terrestrial greenhouse cultivation [3]. The crops were grown in climate rooms to define the optimal light recipes (spectral quality, light intensity, and photoperiod), to optimize the nutrients and water use to check the cultivation and management of crops [4] and top-level suitable crops were listed in Table 1 [3,4] . Choosing crops for cultivation in space, Space missions require bio-regenerative life-support systems. ...
... Eating of fresh food as salad is not only a fundamental requirement for survival but also influences the psychological well being of astronauts operating on long-duration space missions, Human quality aspects, such as taste, appearance, and texture were associated with well-being of astronauts. Yield aspects combined crop yield and growth efficiency in time and space, Production aspects growth modules and the technical aspects of cultivation [4] . ...
... A detailed description of the design process of the MTF and its components, plant selection and project development can be found elsewhere. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] The MTF is located 400 meters south of the German Neumayer Station III (70°40´S, 008°16´W) on the Ekström ice shelf in the vicinity of the Atka Bay. The station is operated year-round with a summer (November to February) crew of 50-60 people and a winter (February to November) crew of 9 people. ...
EDEN ISS is a European project focused on advancing bio-regenerative life support systems, in particular plant cultivation in space. A mobile test facility was designed and built between March 2015 and October 2017. The facility incorporates a Service Section which houses several subsystems necessary for plant cultivation and the Future Exploration Greenhouse. The latter is built similar to a future space greenhouse and provides a fully controlled environment for plant cultivation. The facility was setup in Antarctica in January 2018 and successfully operated between February and November of the same year. During that nine month period around 270 kg of food was produced by the crops cultivation in the greenhouse. It is the wish and more often the need for scientific projects to communicate their outcomes not only to the scientific community, but also to the general public. The EDEN ISS project and in particular the experimental phase in Antarctica was accompanied by extensive public outreach activities. Presence in social media, a project website, informative flyers, an experimental toolkit for young students were created in order to engage with the general public. This paper describes the different public outreach activities of the project and also evaluates their effectiveness. For the evaluation, statistics from the website and social media accounts as well as responses to press releases and educational activities are being displayed. Based on the experience from the outreach campaign of EDEN ISS, the paper provides recommendations on how to organize and conduct public outreach activities for scientific projects in space exploration
... The MTF was designed and built as an experimental facility for plant cultivation systems, allowing the test of essential technologies and production procedures for future long-duration human space missions (Zabel et al., 2015). Detailed system analysis was conducted by the consortium partners resulting in a solid design (Bamsey et al., 2014(Bamsey et al., , 2016Zabel et al., 2016b), including a complete risk assessment (Santos et al., 2016). The MTF consists of two customized 20 foot high cube shipping containers, which are placed on top of a raised platform located ∼400 m south of Neumayer III. ...
... A detailed description of the illumination subsystem is provided by Zabel et al. (2016b). Each plant cultivation tray has its own LED lamp which can be independently controlled in terms of light spectrum and light intensity. ...
The EDEN ISS greenhouse is a space-analog test facility near the German Neumayer III station in Antarctica. The facility is part of the project of the same name and was designed and built starting from March 2015 and eventually deployed in Antarctica in January 2018. The nominal operation of the greenhouse started on February 7th and continued until the 20th of November. The purpose of the facility is to enable multidisciplinary research on topics related to future plant cultivation on human space exploration missions. Research on food quality and safety, plant health monitoring, microbiology, system validation, human factors and horticultural sciences was conducted. Part of the latter is the determination of the biomass production of the different crops. The data on this topic is presented in this paper. During the first season 26 different crops were grown on the 12.5 m² cultivation area of the greenhouse. A large number of crops were grown continuously throughout the 9 months of operation, but there were also crops that were only grown a few times for test purposes. The focus of this season was on growing lettuce, leafy greens and fresh vegetables. In total more than 268 kg of edible biomass was produced by the EDEN ISS greenhouse facility in 2018. Most of the harvest was cucumbers (67 kg), lettuces (56 kg), leafy greens (49 kg), and tomatoes (50 kg) complemented with smaller amounts of herbs (12 kg), radish (8 kg), and kohlrabi (19 kg). The environmental set points for the crops were 330–600 μmol/(m2*s) LED light, 21°C, ∼65% relative humidity, 1000 ppm and the photoperiod was 17 h per day. The overall yearly productivity of the EDEN ISS greenhouse in 2018 was 27.4 kg/m², which is equal to 0.075 kg/(m2*d). This paper shows in detail the data on edible and inedible biomass production of each crop grown in the EDEN ISS greenhouse in Antarctica during the 2018 season.
... The EDEN ISS MTF is located in Antarctica, roughly 400 m from Neumayer Station III (NMIII) (Zabel et al., 2016b) (Fig. 1A). NMIII is located on the Ekström Ice Shelf in Dronning Maud Land, and is operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) (Zabel et al., 2015). ...
The concept of using informative wavelength imagery to monitor plant health and ecosystem stability from space is derived from the deployment of Landsat and the development of the Normalized Difference Vegetative Index, or NDVI. NDVI presents the relative reflectance of the Near IR from plant leaves as a measure of relative plant health in terrestrial habitats and landscapes. However, the use of NDVI and NDVI-like imagery is rapidly evolving toward higher spatial resolution and more localized assessments of plant health, such as the use of drone imagery to monitor outdoor farms, and the use of mounted cameras within indoor growing facilities. With the advancement of plant growth systems in support of human space exploration, especially to the moon and Mars, remote assessment of plant health within exploration habitats becomes a critical element for development. This project examines the deployment of NDVI-like capabilities within a planetary analog greenhouse on the Antarctic ice shelf. The EDEN ISS Antarctica project provides a case study on the practical use of specific wavelength imagery to monitor plant health within space exploration environments. GoPro cameras, modified to dual bandpass capabilities, provided Single Image NDVI analyses for a year within the EDEN ISS Future Exploration Greenhouse at the Neumayer Station III in Antarctica. Images were acquired on site, analyzed remotely, and archived for the entire duration of the deployment through a combination of back-room science activities and operational communications with the Neumayer Station III. The results provide insights into the potential use of specific imaging wavelengths to enhance crop production in space exploration.
... The MTF houses the Future Exploration Greenhouse (FEG), which is a space greenhouse test facility with a cultivation area of 12.5 m² and a Service Section which contains the subsystem necessary to run the FEG and a work desk including a sink. A detailed description of the design process of the MTF and its components, plant selection and project development can be found elsewhere [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] ...
The EDEN ISS greenhouse is a space-analogue test facility near the German Neumayer III station in Antarctica. The facility is part of the project of the same name and was designed and built since 2015 and eventually deployed in Antarctica in January 2018. The first operational phase of the greenhouse started on February the 7th and continued until the 20th of November 2018. The purpose of the facility is to enable multidisciplinary research on topics related to future plant cultivation on human space exploration missions. Research on food quality and safety, plant health monitoring, microbiology, system validation, human factors and horticultural sciences was conducted. Part of the latter was an experiment to compare different plant cultivation techniques for lettuce and tomato plants. For lettuce two different harvest methods were applied, either batch harvesting of the fully grown lettuce heads or spread harvesting of mature leaves while leaving the plant alive to allow regrowth. The dwarf tomato plants were cultivated for three different durations. The short growth cycle ended right after the first set of fruits were harvested. The plants were then terminated and new plants sown. The longest duration cultivation involved several pruning events were old stems and leaves were removed from the plants allowing regrowth of new shoots. This paper compares the impact of the different cultivation techniques on the biomass output, the required crewtime and the required energy. The results show that depending on whether the goal is to optimize for highest biomass production, lowest energy demand or lowest crewtime demand some cultivation techniques are more favorable than others.
... This competition is thus similar, albeit more extensive, to the EDEN project (Evolution and Design of Environmentally closed Nutritionsources). It was initiated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in order to test in Antarctica what abiotic properties would be necessary to allow optimized plant growth and yield under extraterrestrial spaceship or greenhouse conditions (Zabel et al., 2016). Conceptually, a team around the ecologist and environmental scientist Morgan Irons goes even further, as they focus on the need for a holistic ecosystem approach. ...
In ecology and conservation biology, the concept of assisted evolution aims at the optimization of the resilience of organisms and populations to changing environmental conditions. What has hardly been considered so far is that this concept is also relevant for future astrobiological research, since in artificial extraterrestrial habitats (e.g., plants and insects in martian greenhouses) novel environmental conditions will also affect the survival and performance of organisms. The question therefore arises whether and how space-relevant organisms can be artificially adapted to the desired circumstances in advance. Based on several adaptation and acclimatization strategies in wild ecosystems of Earth, I discuss which methods can be considered for assisted evolution in the context of astrobiological research. This includes enhanced selective breeding, induction of epigenetic inheritance, and genetic engineering, as well as possible problems of these applications. This short overview article aims to stimulate an emerging discussion as to whether humans, which are already prominent drivers of Earth's evolution, should consider such interventions for future planetary colonization as well.
... The MTF houses the Future Exploration Greenhouse (FEG), which is a space greenhouse test facility with a cultivation area of 12.5 m² and a Service Section which contains the subsystem necessary to run the FEG and a work desk including a sink. A detailed description of the design process of the MTF and its components, plant selection and project development can be found elsewhere [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] . ...
The EDEN ISS project partners deployed a space greenhouse analogue at the Neumayer Station III in Antarctica in January 2018. The greenhouse is incorporated in two interconnected 20 foot shipping containers and positioned around 400 meters away from the research station. All subsystems required for plant cultivation are inside this so called Mobile Test Facility. The cultivation area of around 12.5 m² is arranged in a shelf-like structure in one of the containers, while the other container houses the subsystems and a small working area. Between February and November 2018 one of the authors was the only on-site operator of the greenhouse. In that time it was his responsibility to cultivate various plants and to execute numerous experiments. One of the experiments was the determination of the crewtime required for plant cultivation. A formula to calculate the crewtime use inside a space greenhouse has been developed. This paper also presents crewtime values for various activities related to the operation of a space greenhouse. The focus is on the tasks related to plant cultivation such as sowing, pruning, harvesting and cleaning. Crewtime has been measured independently for different crop species, because each crop species requires different tasks to be performed during cultivation. Additionally, the task schedule and related crewtime of complete workdays have been documented at several occasions during the nine months of operation of the EDEN ISS greenhouse in Antarctica.
... The project started in March 2015 and plans to deploy the greenhouse in December 2017. From there on it will be operated for 12 months continuously (Zabel et al., 2015;Zabel et al., 2016b;Vrakking et al., 2017;Zabel et al., 2017). ...
Earth’s biosphere is sustained by its biological diversity, which forms an intricate network of biological, physical and chemical pathways. This network has many fail-safe redundant func-tions including buffer stocks of inert biomass, huge amounts of water and the large volume of gases in the atmosphere. By contrast, manmade habitats for human space exploration are closed ecosystems that represent only a trivial fraction of Earth’s biosphere. The employment of bio-regenerative processes complemented with physical-chemical tech-nologies is thought to have numerous advantages from the perspective of redundancy and reducing resupply mass for the sustained human presence in space or on other planetary surfaces. However, the combination of bio-regenerative processes, such as plant cultivation, with physical-chemical processes to form hybrid life support systems is challenging. Such systems are a concert of many interdependencies and interacting feedback loops, which are difficult to operate in a desired range of set points. Furthermore, the complexity of such sys-tems makes them vulnerable to perturbations. Applying system dynamics modelling to study hybrid life support systems is a promising ap-proach. System dynamics is a methodology used to study the dynamic behavior of complex systems and how such systems can be defended against, or made to benefit from, the per-turbations that fall upon them. This thesis describes the development of a system dynamics model to run exploratory simulations, which can lead to new insights into the complex behav-ior of hybrid life support systems. An improved understanding of the overall system behavior also helps to develop sustainable, reliable and resilient life support architectures for future human space exploration. A set of simulations with a hybrid life support system integrated into a Mars habitat has been executed and the results show a strong impact of space greenhouses on the life support sys-tem behavior and the different matter flows. It is also evident from the simulation results that a hybrid life support system can recover from a perturbation event in most cases without a fatal mission end. Recycling urine to produce a plant nutrient solution is a novel approach in further closing loops in space life support systems. Within this thesis, a number of experiments have been executed in order to determine the effectiveness of a urine-derived nutrient solution com-pared to a standard reference solution. The results show that in principle plants can be grown with a nutrient solution made of human urine, but that the yield is lower compared to the reference solution. However, the urine-derived solution might be tuned by adding small amounts of additional nutrients to remove the imbalance of certain elements. This way the nutrient salts supplied from Earth could be reduced.
... EDEN ISS is a plant growth module that is being tested currently at Neumayer Station in Antarctica. Contrary to most other systems presented here, EDEN ISS is only a semi-closed system, focusing more on safe food production and less on recycling of waste products [9]. • Russian researchers began investigating space agriculture in the 1970s with the BIOS projects. ...
Life support systems are a crucial factor in any type of Moon village or Mars outpost. To achieve a sustainable setup , a growth medium, as well as several essential nutrients, are necessary. The typical approach in current mission architectures is to resupply these nutrients and growth medium from Earth, which is costly and has a high degree of dependence on cargo rockets. Here, we discuss emerging technologies to utilize lunar and Martian soil and increase their nutrient composition for plant growth. We are using microbes to remove heavy metals and increase the concentration of suitable biomolecules in the regolith. The combination of life-support systems with biological and technical in situ resource utilization would increase the reliability and sustainability of extraterrestrial plant growth in a significant way and ultimately pave the way for human colonies on other celestial bodies.
