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.

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.

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:

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.