Storage management and post-harvest considerations of greenhouse systems for planetary habitats

Abstract

Traveling through the universe and exploring new planets has been a long-term dream for humankind. Settlement on other planets might even be a necessity for the human race to survive in the long term. Sending humans to Mars is an achievable goal and the necessary capabilities to get and live there are being developed. The EDEN (Evolution and Design of an Environmentally-closed Nutrition source) initiative of the DLR (German Aerospace Center) researches bio-regenerative life support systems (BLSS) for the use in International Space Station (ISS) and for future habitats on Moon and Mars. The artificial ecosystems enable humans to live and work in space during deep space missions or for permanent settlements. BLSS are characterized by a closed loop environment which consist of plants, animals and microorganisms. In this work, the production plan for the crop cultivation is reviewed and analyzed and storage considerations for the produced crops are investigated. After giving an overview of the production factors and assumptions, the production plan is discussed by looking at two cultivation approaches. Subsequently, the pro-duced amount of biomass is analyzed over the period of 400 days. To generate the ideal storage system, first the shelf life of the different crops is re-viewed. By considering factors such as temperature and air humidity, a system for the storage of crops is investigated and the storage conditions and methods are ex-amined. Considering the production plan and the pre-defined habitat demand set points, two methods for the calculation of the storage duration were developed for both approaches and compared with the shelf life. Subsequently, the storage volume is calculated and optimized.