Designing greenhouse subsystems for a lunar mission: the LOOPS - M Project

The 2020s is a very important decade in the space sector, where international cooperation is moving towards the exploration of the Moon and will lead to stable lunar settlements, which will require new, innovative, and efficient technologies. In this context, the project LOOPS–M (Lunar Operative Outpost for the Production and Storage of Microgreens) was created by students from Sapienza University of Rome with the objective of designing some of the main features of a lunar greenhouse. The project was developed for the IGLUNA 2021 campaign, an interdisciplinary platform coordinated by Space Innovation as part of the ESA Lab@ initiative. The LOOPS-M mission was successfully concluded during the Virtual Field Campaign that took place in July 2021. This project is a follow-up of the V-GELM Project, which took part in IGLUNA 2020 with the realization in Virtual Reality of a Lunar Greenhouse: a simulation of the main operations connected to the cultivation module, the HORT3 , which was already developed by ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) during the AMADEE-18 mission inside the HORTSPACE project. This paper will briefly describe the main features designed and developed for the lunar greenhouse and their simulation in a VR environment: an autonomous cultivation system able to handle the main cultivation tasks of the previous cultivation system, a bioconversion system that can recycle into new resources the cultivation waste with the use of insects as a biodegradation system, and a shield able of withstanding hypervelocity impacts and the harsh lunar environment. A wide overview of the main challenges faced, and lessons learned by the team to obtain these results, will be given. The first challenge was the initial inexperience that characterized all the team members, being for most the first experience with an activity structured as a space mission, starting with little to no know-how regarding the software and hardware needed for the project, and how to structure documentation and tasks, which was acquired throughout the year. An added difficulty was the nature of LOOPS-M, which included very different objectives that required different fields of expertise, ranging from various engineering sectors to biology and entomology. During the year, the team managed to learn how to handle all these hurdles and the organizational standpoint, working as a group, even if remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Through careful planning, hard work and the help of supervisors, the activity was carried out through reviews, up to the prototyping phase and the test campaign with a successful outcome in each aspect of the project. By the end of the year everyone involved had acquired new knowledge, both practical and theoretical, and learned how to reach out and present their work to sponsors and to the scientific community

Analog fuzzy implementation of a vehicle traction sliding-mode control

Road adherence is an imprecise function of many parameters strongly affected by road conditions. In this paper, we propose a very robust control with a static nonlinear feedback law which can consider adherence and other model uncertainties, regulating the wheel slip at any desired value with good precision properties. A sliding-mode control has been designed to provide stability and reliability. Once designed, the control surface has been fuzzified and implemented with a programmable analog fuzzy circuit which uses a 0.7 mu m CMOS technology provided by SGS-Thomson Microelectronics. This implementation is carried out with a semi-automatic design flow and features high computational efficiency at it very low cost, especially when compared to a digital one. Moreover, the controller response time is less than 1 mu s. A flexible control of the slip coefficient has been performed. Results show that the desired slip coefficient is reached and kept with good approximation in compliance with theoretical results

Roma in divenire tra identità e conflitti

Questo volume presenta il versante italiano di una ricerca internazionale sulla metropoli, Pratiche di vita e produzione del senso fra Roma e San Paolo, diretta da Isabella Pezzini (Sapienza Univeristà di Roma) e Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira (Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil) dedicata a due città in apparenza fra loro diversissime. In realtà, ad accumunarle non vi è solo il processo di globalizzazione che innesca dinamiche molto simili in tutte le città del mondo, ma anzitutto lo sguardo a partire dal quale esse vengono attraversate. L’approccio semiotico privilegia qui i temi dell’identità, dell’immaginario urbano, del consumo, e si concentra inoltre sullo spazio metropolitano come terreno in cui emergono conflitti così come nuove forme di creatività e espressione artistica. Ne risulta una rete di percorsi originali attraverso pratiche, rappresentazioni, forme di vita, riflessioni e analisi sui paesaggi semiotici della città, da cui emergono le tante diverse “Rome” che convivono spesso ignorandosi. Dal lavoro di sintesi operato dai simboli agli slanci architettonici verso la modernità, dal cinema ai luoghi del lusso e del tifo sportivo, ma anche, in negativo, all’incuria e all’abbandono di tanti luoghi storici, soprattutto nelle zone periferiche, dove accanto ai graffiti dei writers fioriscono inaspettati i murales della street art. Testi di: Barone, Bertolotti, Bonafede, Cervelli, Del Marco, Greco, Manini, Peverini, Pezzini, Ricci, Sedda, Sorrentino, Terracciano, Vella, Torrini.This volume presents the Italian side of an international research about metropolises, life practices and the production of meaning between Rome and São Paulo, directed by Isabella Pezzini (Sapienza University of Rome) and Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira (Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo , Brazil) dedicated to two cities in appearance very different from each other. In fact, making them comparable is the process of globalization which triggers very similar dynamics in all the cities of the world, but first of all look at which they are crossed. The semiotic approach emphasizes in this book the themes of identity, urban imagery, consumption, and also focuses on the metropolitan area as ground in which emerge conflicts as well as new forms of creativity and artistic expression. The result is a network of paths through the original practices, representations, forms of life, reflections on and analyzes of semiotic landscape of the city, from which emerge the many different "Rome" who live together often ignoring. The work of synthesis operated by the symbols to the architectural impulses toward modernity, from cinema to places of luxury and sport support, but also in the negative, the neglect and abandonment of so many historical places, especially in remote areas, where next to graffiti writers flourish unexpected murals of street art

Asthma in patients admitted to emergency department for COVID-19: prevalence and risk of hospitalization

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