As humans travel further into the Solar System for longer periods of time, many challenges must be solved. One challenge is ensuring an adequate food supply for the crew. Currently all of the food that is consumed by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) is prepackaged on Earth and transported to the ISS. This approach requires a significant investment of mass and the long-term stability of nutrients in the stored food is unclear. Especially the impact of radiation outside of low-Earth orbit may have a negative impact on the stored food.

Along 20 years of life sciences research in space, several full size microscopes were developed (phase contrast, fluorescence analysis, and recently the Advanced Light Microscope from NASA) to be used on board the ISS. However, such bulky systems appeared to prevent a versatile use and limit the potential of experiments that can be performed today on ground. In particular, none of them can be accommodated on an on board centrifuge to perform experiments in microgravity and at various G level. And for most of them, the samples are fixed on a glass slide and allow only static analyses.

In most in vitro cell models, cultures are made adhering to flat culture slides and the expected activation of specific cell markers is measured on cells. However, in this simplified condition, cell response is not representative of the in vivo response, which is based on cell interactions that occur in three-dimensional (3D) non-flat environments and between several cell populations.

In order for off-Earth top surface structures built from regolith to protect astronauts from radiation, they need to be several metres thick. With support from European Space Agency (ESA) and Vertico, the Technical University Delft (TUD) advanced research into constructing habitats in empty lava tubes on Mars in order to create subsurface habitats. By building below ground level not only natural protection from radiation is achieved but also thermal insulation because the temperature below ground is more stable.

The goal of this study was to develop a design for a lunar habitat in the close vicinity of one of the lunar poles and to demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested design in view of the available resources. The habitat should operate self-sufficiently in the long term by producing and recycling its own oxygen and food inside large greenhouses and almost exclusively by using solar irradiation power. The proposed  concept features a combination of:

The goal of the project was to develop a service as a product to simplify fitting DNN (Deep Learning Neural Networks) in on board HW to make better use of AI on space missions The role of the service is to support data processing engineers in reducing HW resources requirement of powerful DNN for image analysis to be executed onboard. 

Space missions benefit greatly by the capability of the on-board GNC system to adapt rapidly to unknown environment. Autonomous vision-based navigation is a particular technology under implementation in several ESA missions. One of the most interesting applications in that field is the proximity operations around a small asteroid, like those in HERA.
The goal of this activity was to develop a navigation algorithm with the capability to fly over an unknown terrain and achieve better navigation performances than current vision-based techniques based on unknown feature tracking.

Heating samples to extract volatiles is a standard way to characterise solid samples. By heating a sample and recording the temperature profile results it can explain a lot about the nature of those volatiles and allow them to be collected and analysed further. This technique is, in principle, a standard process in terrestrial laboratories and the same principle is applied in-situ for planetary analysis where solid samples are delivered to an oven, which is sealed and heated to produce signatures of the volatiles.