Summary and Evaluation of the EDEN ISS Public Outreach Activities

EDEN ISS is a European project focused on advancing bio-regenerative life support systems, in particular plant cultivation in space. A mobile test facility was designed and built between March 2015 and October 2017. The facility incorporates a Service Section which houses several subsystems necessary for plant cultivation and the Future Exploration Greenhouse. The latter is built similar to a future space greenhouse and provides a fully controlled environment for plant cultivation. The facility was setup in Antarctica in January 2018 and successfully operated between February and November of the same year. During that nine month period around 270 kg of food was produced by the crops cultivation in the greenhouse. It is the wish and more often the need for scientific projects to communicate their outcomes not only to the scientific community, but also to the general public. The EDEN ISS project and in particular the experimental phase in Antarctica was accompanied by extensive public outreach activities. Presence in social media, a project website, informative flyers, an experimental toolkit for young students were created in order to engage with the general public. This paper describes the different public outreach activities of the project and also evaluates their effectiveness. For the evaluation, statistics from the website and social media accounts as well as responses to press releases and educational activities are being displayed. Based on the experience from the outreach campaign of EDEN ISS, the paper provides recommendations on how to organize and conduct public outreach activities for scientific projects in space exploratio

Introducing EDEN ISS - A European project on advancing plant cultivation technologies and operations

Plant cultivation in large-scale closed environments is challenging and several key technologies necessary for space-based plant production are not yet space-qualified or remain in early stages of development. The EDEN ISS project foresees development and demonstration of higher plant cultivation technologies, suitable for future deployment on the International Space Station and from a long-term perspective, within Moon and Mars habitats. The EDEN ISS consortium will design and test essential plant cultivation technologies using an International Standard Payload Rack form factor cultivation system for potential testing on-board the International Space Station. Furthermore, a Future Exploration Greenhouse will be designed with respect to future planetary bio-regenerative life support system deployments. The technologies will be tested in a laboratory environment as well as at the highly-isolated German Antarctic Neumayer Station III. A small and mobile container-sized test facility will be built in order to provide realistic mass flow relationships. In addition to technology development and validation, food safety and plant handling procedures will be developed. This paper describes the goals and objectives of EDEN ISS and the different project phases and milestones. Furthermore, the project consortium will be introduced and the role of each partner within the project is explained

Living architecture: metabolic applications for next-generation, selectively programmable bioreactors

Vital natural resources are depleting and being wasted in today's industrialized and agricultural processes. Critical planetary boundaries have been transgressed with major effects on biodiversity loss and climate change. Necessary elements for our daily life such as nitrogen and phosphorus are being lost through household wastewater. The EU-funded project Living Architecture which is currently under development addresses these issues through a selectively programmable bioreactor that recovers phosphates, cleans water, and produces electricity. The Living Architecture system, to be realized in 2019 as a partition wall to be incorporated into existing buildings, is further speculated in design scenarios, including a remote research facility for extreme environments and for application into the urban context as infrastructure.The project Living Architecture GA no 686585 has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program. Project SHEE – Self-deployable Habitat for Extreme Environments GA no 312747 has received funding from the European Union's FP7 Research and Innovation Program.Peer reviewe

EDEN ISS: A SIMULATION TESTBED TO AN ADVANCED XPLORATION DESIGN CONCEPT FOR A GREENHOUSE FOR MOON AND MARS

This paper takes the EDEN ISS project as example to demonstrate how findings from greenhouse tests and a 12- month mission simulation in Antarctica can inform the design for a future lunar or Martian exploration greenhouse and presents design solutions. EDEN ISS, a four-year EU-H2020 project coordinated by the German Aerospace Center Bremen, is a Ground Demonstration of Plant Cultivation Technologies for Safe Food Production in Space. EDEN ISS project partners developed an advanced nutrient delivery system, a high-performance LED lighting system, a bio-detection and decontamination system and food quality and safety procedures and technologies. A mobile two-container-sized greenhouse test facility was built to demonstrate and validate different key technologies and procedures necessary for safe food production within a (semi-)closed system. EDEN ISS is currently installed next to the German Neumayer Station III in Antarctica and serves as an over-winter-test-bed for providing fresh vegetables to the crew's diet. Intermediate outcomes from the Antarctic test include engineering, technology and crew experience facts and will inform the extra-terrestrial greenhouse design. The paper outlines the current research and expedition status and references design concepts for exploration greenhouses which are relevant to the further development of EDEN ISS into a concept for future mission exploration on the moon and on Mars. The reference examples will serve as input to the concurrent design study planned for January 2019 where the team around DLR, Thales Alenia Space and LIQUIFER Systems Group will convene to finalise the EDEN ISS project from a future perspective point of view. They will look at integrating lessons learnt for architectural aspects, system performance, crop yield, crew acceptance and contamination. Concurrent engineering, used as methodology, will support the synthesis of the findings and at the same time will ensure the reflection of this information in the design proposals

GREENHOUSE DESIGN CONCEPTS FOR MOON AND MARS

This paper will show the methodology used for developing a greenhouse design concept for moon and Mars, derived from the EDEN ISS simulation facility in Antarctica. This document details the preliminary design of a future planetary greenhouse, adapted from the Mobile Test Facility (MTF) which was built and operated as part of the EDEN ISS project. Lessons learned from the Antarctic operations phase, as well as references to existing mission scenarios were considered for establishing system requirements. Based on these requirements, a preliminary design of the greenhouse structure, and plant cultivation subsystems was developed. The preliminary design presented in this document is a deployable cylindrical structure, with rigid end caps and an inflatable membrane shell. The structure has been sized to fit within the payload fairing of a Falcon 9 launcher (or similar), with a stowed configuration diameter of 4 meters and a length of 6.3 meters. Following deployment, the structure is envisioned to be 12.9 meters long and the membrane shell will expand to a diameter of 5 meters. An estimation of the subsystem volumes was made in order to design the internal configuration. This internal layout offers 30.8 m² of cultivation area, a more than twofold increase over the existing Mobile Test Facility. Differences and similarities between the two facilities are discussed

A Small Covalent Allosteric Inhibitor of Human Cytomegalovirus DNA Polymerase Subunit Interactions

Human cytomegalovirus DNA polymerase comprises a catalytic subunit, UL54, and an accessory subunit, UL44, the interaction of which may serve as a target for the development of new antiviral drugs. Using a high-throughput screen, we identified a small molecule, (5-((dimethylamino)­methylene-3-(methylthio)-6,7-dihydrobenzo­[<i>c</i>]­thiophen-4­(5<i>H</i>)-one), that selectively inhibits the interaction of UL44 with a UL54-derived peptide in a time-dependent manner, full-length UL54, and UL44-dependent long-chain DNA synthesis. A crystal structure of the compound bound to UL44 revealed a covalent reaction with lysine residue 60 and additional noncovalent interactions that cause steric conflicts that would prevent the UL44 connector loop from interacting with UL54. Analyses of the reaction of the compound with model substrates supported a resonance-stabilized conjugation mechanism, and substitution of the lysine reduced the ability of the compound to inhibit UL44-UL54 peptide interactions. This novel covalent inhibitor of polymerase subunit interactions may serve as a starting point for new, needed drugs to treat human cytomegalovirus infections