EDEN ISS – Status Report & Mission Overview

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 longterm perspective, within Moon and Mars habitats. The technologies will be tested in a laboratory environment as well as at the highly-isolated German Antarctic Neumayer Station III. A shipping container based test facility has been 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. The presentation gives an overview of the final design and the Assembly, Integration and Test phase that took place at DLR Bremen over the last 15 months. Furthermore, an overview of the actual mission in Antarctica is provided as well as the experiments and validation tests that will take place during the analogue mission. The Antarctic mission starts on December 19th 2017 and will last ~12 months. As part of the presentation, the DLR team will wish farewell to one of its team members who will spend over one year in Antarctica operating the EDEN ISS facility