Highlights 2014 - Yearly status report EDEN Initiative

Kurzfassung

The EDEN initiative is now in its fourth year of existence. Much has happened in the last years, but 2014 was an extraordinary one! Sustained human presence in space requires the development of new technologies to maintain environment control, to provide water, oxygen, food and to keep the astronauts healthy and psychologically fit. Bio-regenerative Life Support Systems (BLSS) in conjunction with in-situ resource utilization will initially reduce and ultimately eliminate consumables from the logistics chain. Minimizing the need for resupply while ensuring human safety will allow astronauts to travel further and stay longer in space than ever before. Therefore, major goal of the EDEN group is the investigation of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) processes and developing the associated technologies for space. Following this direction, several important milestones were accomplished during 2014, such as the opening of the new Space Habitation Plant Laboratory (SHPL), the organization of the 4th international Agrospace Workshop, participation in the HI-SEAS II analogue mission, and the successfully performed Concurrent Engineering (CE) study of ESA’s Lunar greenhouse module. But without any doubt, the most significant was the successful evaluation of the Horizon 2020 EDEN ISS proposal, which scored with 14.5 out of 15 points. Starting early 2015, the EDEN group will take over the project lead and will coordinate 13 international partners over the next four years. Exciting times ahead! Worthwhile to mention is the Strategy & Portfolio document, which was published for the first time by the EDEN team in 2014. It outlines the group’s key research domains, the involved projects, the spin-off projects, and outreach activities. Nearing the end of 2014, Lucie Poulet left the group in order to pursue her PhD research at the Université Blaise Pascal, France. Although her departure is hard for the group, we wish her all the best and are looking forward collaborating with her in the future.