Search

Plant cultivation in large-scale closed environments is challenging and several key technologies necessary for space-based plant production are not yet space-qualified or remain in early stages of development. The Horizon2020 EDEN ISS project aims at development and demonstration of higher plant cultivation technologies, suitable for near term deployment on the International Space Station (ISS) and from a long-term perspective, within Moon and Mars habitats. The EDEN ISS consortium, as part of the performed activities, has designed a plant cultivation system to have form, fit and function of an European Drawer Rack 2 (EDR II) payload, with a modularity that would allow its incremental installation in the ISS homonimous rack, occupying from one-quarter rack to the full system. The construction phase is started, and the developed system will be tested in a laboratory environment as well as at the highly-isolated German Antarctic Neumayer Station III, in a container-sized test facility to provide realistic mass flow relationships and interaction with a crewed environment. This paper describes the goals and system general design status of EDEN ISS ISPR plant growth facility.

The EDEN ISS project is aimed at testing key technologies in view of space operations. The Mobile Test Facility represents a platform to verify the possibility to manage plant growth and safe food production in extreme conditions. But the race to space is done of small steps having the objective to reach intermediates goals, like for example the understanding on how the plants can be grown and managed in a closed ambient and with conditions that are different from those experience on hearth (for example under low gravity conditions, with artificial lighting conditions, etc). That includes the verification and the validation of the technical solutions that have to be designed to work in these conditions. For example the distribution of water and nutrients to the plants is a critical items in the absence of gravity, because the water, the air and the nutrient solutions distribute in different way. Several experiments are therefore required to increase the knowledge of the plant and system behaviour in space and to solve all the technical uncertainties in order to be ready for a complex mission that foresees the production of food on an extra-terrestrial outpost. For that reason, in the EDEN ISS project, a small laboratory has been implemented as first step on the way that to design and realize a scientific payload for plant experiments on board of the ISS. This laboratory, called RUCOLA (Rack-like Unit for Consistent on-Orbit Leafy crops Availability), has been designed looking at a future integration in the new version of the European Drawer Rack (EDR MKII) on board of the Columbus, the European Module of the International Space Station. The present document has the scope to follow-up the lessons learnt from the laboratory and the Antarctica test campaigns by outlining the following aspects:  Identification of the preliminary architecture of a plant growth rack-size experiment on the ISS – the RUCOLA system (Chapter 1)  Identification of the RUCOLA flight system preliminary physical configuration (Chapter 2)  Preliminary identification of the ISS test objectives and derivation of the flight operations, , including a preliminary list of the activities to be performed by ISS astronauts and ground operators (Chapter 3)  Identification of the RUCOLA products to be used for on board operations and the related development processes (Chapter 4)  Identification of a possible setup of a control centre and its connection to the ISS ground network, including the tools required for the RUCOLA remote operations (Chapter 5)  Identification of a set of relevant aspects related to growing plants on-board ISS (Chapter 7) The design stage is not mature enough to already develop detailed flight operational procedures or to develop tools for RUCOLA remote operations (as matter of fact the operations preparations, including the setup of the ground segment, starts from the phase C/D of a project, and we are pretty far from this phase). For this reason this document focuses on the analysis of the operations scenario, with the description of the on board and remote activities, in order to correctly define the operations requirements in view of a future development of the RUCOLA Flight Unit.

The EDEN ISS project is aimed at testing key technologies in view of space operations. The Mobile Test Facility represents a platform to verify the possibility to manage plant growth and safe food production in extreme conditions. But the race to space is done of small steps having the objective to reach intermediates goals, like for example the understanding on how the plants can be grown and managed in a closed ambient and with conditions that are different from those experience on hearth (for example under low gravity conditions, with artificial lighting conditions, etc). That includes the verification and the validation of the technical solutions that have to be designed to work in these conditions. For example the distribution of water and nutrients to the plants is a critical items in the absence of gravity, because the water, the air and the nutrient solutions distribute in different way. Several experiments are therefore required to increase the knowledge of the plant and system behaviour in space and to solve all the technical uncertainties in order to be ready for a complex mission that foresees the production of food on an extra-terrestrial outpost. For that reason, in the EDEN ISS project, a small laboratory has been implemented as first step on the way that to design and realize a scientific payload for plant experiments on board of the ISS. This laboratory, called RUCOLA (Rack-like Unit for Consistent on-Orbit Leafy crops Availability), has been designed looking at a future integration in the new version of the European Drawer Rack (EDR MKII) on board of the Columbus, the European Module of the International Space Station. The present document has the scope to follow-up the lessons learnt from the laboratory and the Antarctica test campaigns by outlining the following aspects:  Identification of the preliminary architecture of a plant growth rack-size experiment on the ISS – the RUCOLA system (Chapter 1)  Identification of the RUCOLA flight system preliminary physical configuration (Chapter 2)  Preliminary identification of the ISS test objectives and derivation of the flight operations, , including a preliminary list of the activities to be performed by ISS astronauts and ground operators (Chapter 3)  Identification of the RUCOLA products to be used for on board operations and the related development processes (Chapter 4)  Identification of a possible setup of a control centre and its connection to the ISS ground network, including the tools required for the RUCOLA remote operations (Chapter 5)  Identification of a set of relevant aspects related to growing plants on-board ISS (Chapter 7) The design stage is not mature enough to already develop detailed flight operational procedures or to develop tools for RUCOLA remote operations (as matter of fact the operations preparations, including the setup of the ground segment, starts from the phase C/D of a project, and we are pretty far from this phase). For this reason this document focuses on the analysis of the operations scenario, with the description of the on board and remote activities, in order to correctly define the operations requirements in view of a future development of the RUCOLA Flight Unit.