Close
03/09/2015
Travelling to Mars Is In Progress Near the Barcelona Synchrotron Park
Recently, an original experiment carried out on the International Space Station was exposed by the media: astronauts tested in August the first vegetable ever cultivated into space (a salad) as part of a NASA experiment to help prolong manned missions.
 
Some hundred meters horizontally far from the Barcelona Synchrotron Park (BSP) - and not 400 km above it -, the MELiSSA pilot plant from the European Space Agency (ESA), which is located in the engineering school of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the BSP strategic partner, works on a similar but much more ambitious project.
 
During a round-trip voyage to Mars, a six-person crew would need about 30 tons of food, oxygen and water for the 1,000 days mission. This huge quantity would be drastically reduced if a closed loop system would recycle the CO2 exhaled and the waste produced by the crew in order to produce in return oxygen, water and food, etc.: this is the MELiSSA project.
 
This project started 20 years ago and is founded up to 60% by the ESA (5 million Euros per year). It involves 100 researchers from 30 organizations and 15 European countries. In this puzzle the UAB pilot plant, which was inaugurated in 2009, plays a central role and will soon take a new important step: living beings will be introduced in the plant in order to test some parts of the artificial ecosystem. Rats, not astronauts, at the moment.
 
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/Melissa

More news

23/05/2018 Barcelona Is an Attractive City 11/05/2018 UAB University: Top Spanish University According To CYD Global Ranking 03/05/2018 SENER: above and below ground 26/04/2018 Barcelona Synchrotron Park Supports PRUAB 19/04/2018 Hub b30: the emergency number of innovation! 12/04/2018 ALBA synchrotron can serve automobile sector’s needs
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20