Nebula Public Library

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.

Radioisotope generators provide electrical power for spacecrafts by converting the energy released by the decay of radioisotope fuel into electricity. Non-thermal converters (voltaic devices) make use of the photoelectric effect much in the same way a solar cell does. They are much easier to miniaturize for future chip-sized deep space probes, however performance quickly degrades due to radiation damage.

This project, renamed ACROSS (Asteroid Collaborative Research by Occultation Systematic Survey), aimed at considerably improving the predictability of stellar occultations by small and difficult targets such as the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). In particular, it focused on the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos, target of the DART (NASA) and Hera (ESA) missions, and other NEAs: either secondary targets of Hera, or NEAs whose orbit is accurate enough. Stellar occultations are an unbeatable approach to:

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: