The main aspect of this study is to investigate the feasibility of the mission concept and the demonstration of the economic viability of a commercial payload delivery service to the Moon, as well as demonstrating the production of water/or oxygen with materials from the Moon. The study considered a payload delivery service that would be an end-to end service from Earth to a targeted location on the Moon, launched not later than 2025.

The study and exploitation of In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) technologies (with an initial focus on the Moon) are stimulating an increasing interest in the international community, both at Agency and industry levels, in view of and in preparation for future crewed exploration missions and in terms of scientific and societal long-term benefits.

ALCHEMIST is a payload design created in order to produce water from lunar regolith so as to demonstrate the end-to-end process of hydrogen reduction of FeO on the lunar surface.

Today, aboard ISS, the crew is regularly resupplied with necessary metabolic consumables (i.e. food, water and air) coming from Earth. These consumables are generally packaged into dedicated containers, which cannot be re-used and have to be wasted. For food only, the amount of wastes generated by packaging is estimated to be between 300 and 500g/crew member and day, which represents close to 40% of packed food mass.

The ISRU-DM mission aims to perform the first demonstration of ISRU on the Moon, via the production of water or oxygen from raw lunar material (i.e. regolith, ice etc.) At Agency-level a phase-0 level study was also performed to understand the technical and programmatic feasibility of undertaking the ISRU-DM mission via the provision of commercial services from industry.

The mushroom-forming fungi Pleurotus ostreatus (PO), Trametes versicolor (TV) and Schizophyllum commune (SC) are known to effectively colonise organic material. These fungi were grown on the aquatic fern Azolla filiculoides (AF), the fastest growing plant on Earth, and that can fix its own nitrogen. SC showed the best growth on AF. Therefore, growth of this fungus was determined under microgravity conditions and high radiation dosage (up to 200 Gy) and related to melanin production.

The objective of the Metabolic Characterization of the MELiSSA Waste Compartment, Phase 1 project is to fully characterize, in terms of taxonomy and functional capacity, the microbial community present in the C1 Anaerobic Liquefaction Sub-System (ALSS).

The aim of this study was to assess how space travel modifies local sleep episodes in wakefulness during a visuo-motor task and weather this is related to performance. To this end, specific EEG (electroencephalogram) data previously recorded on board the ISS during the Neurospat experiment (AO-2004, 118) were used.