Border Sessions 2017 #BS17 - AstroPlant
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This presentation is about the AstroPlant project, a collaboration between Border Labs and the European Space Agency. Border Labs is a spinoff of the tech festival Border Sessions in the Hague, which is a yearly international event about future societies (themes include data/ethics, robots, food, space, transport, etc.). Check bordersessions.org. Border Labs and ESA started a collaboration to achieve an ongoing meaningful interaction between the space sector and relevant initiatives in Europe to bring relevant space technologies to earth (to achieve sustainable food systems) and to learn from creative entrepreneurs and initiatives here on earth for space research and projects. One of the main activities is the AstroPlant project, a citizen science project to characterise plants (a real challenge within the MELiSSA project) and the Space Recipe Challenge (another real challenge faced by the MELiSSA project). This presentation is a status update of the open source project. More info on borderlabs.org.
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Border Sessions 2017 #BS17 - AstroPlant
- 6. MELiSSA
- 8. Recycling on the ISS
- 9. Going to Mars • 1000 days in isolation • Crew of six requires 30 tonnes of water, oxygen, and food. • Max payload 9 tonnes
- 10. MELiSSA: turning metabolic waste into consumables • Waste • CO2 • Feces • Urine • Non-edible biomass Inspired by nature. • Consumables • O2 • Food • Water
- 14. I: Liquifying compartment • In: • Human waste • Non-edible biomass • Out: • Fatty acids • Minerals • Ammonium • CO2, H2
- 15. II: Photoheterotrophic-compartment • Further digestion • In • Smelly and poisonous stuff from compartment I • Out • Minerals and NH4
- 16. III: Nitrification Compartment • In • Urine • Minerals • O2 • Out • Minerals • NO3
- 17. IVa: Algae Compartment IVb: Higher Plant Compartment • In • Nitrates • CO2 • Out • Food! • Oxygen! • Non-edible biomass
- 21. AstroPlant: a small DIY plant lab stuffed with sensors?
- 23. #1 - Use design principles to boldly go where no one has gone before…
- 24. #2 - Aim for a next generation of space farmers
- 27. Who will eventually tend these space gardens? Design robot farms? Improve crop yields?
- 28. #3 - Create impact by being open and accessible
- 30. #4 – Reduce, reuse, recycle
- 32. Where are we now?
- 35. Christel Paille – MELiSSA, ESA Christophe Lasseur – MELiSSA, ESA Raffaella Pappalardo – ESA GJ van t Veen – Dutch Coast Michel Behre – Border Sessions Arthur vd Graaf - Get a crowd Angelo Vermeulen – SEAD Advisers and partners
- 39. NEXT: Testing this prototype and working towards a KickStarter
- 40. @BORDER_LABS
Editor's Notes
- With the end of the second world war, more than 72 years ago, a new war had already started. It was the war between east and west, communism versus capitalism. This tension between the two superpowers didn’t just bring bad things and tensions, no. Something beautiful emerged from it… it created the space race… FINALLY humanity ventured out into the galaxy.
- First with a dog. Then with people on the moon. Then collectively building an international space station. With rovers on Mars and now even putting a lander on a comet flying over 11 kilometers per second. And now, ALMOST 50 years after we put a man on the moon, we are considering the moon again — NOT as a final destination, but as launch base to explore Mars and deep space. Forget little green men, humans will explore and inhabit Mars.
- THIS, however, brings new challenges. Great new challenges all coming down to: how to live in space, and not just surviving for a few months. NOW, the NEXT GREAT STEP of human exploration are human settlements on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
- My name is Thieme Hennis and I represent Border Labs, which was launched last year at this festival as an instrument to kickstart concepts and ideas that emerge during this conference. We launched last year with the European Space Agency to bring closer together these two communities: the space industry and the creative pioneers here at this festival. To bring people together, you need to have a common objective. Well, we have this objective right? To go to space and make sure people can live there. But maybe… maybe we need something more workable. More practical. So eventually, after a few workshops and discussions, we came to the idea of building a small plant lab for young explorers to help the scientists at ESA with data about plant growth. This lab, and the project I am talking about, is called AstroPlant. Now, in order to better understand AstroPlant and how it will help us to become inhabitants of Mars, I need to tell you something about the MELiSSA project, which is headed by the European Space Agency.
- MELiSSA is the acronym for “Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative” and its sole objective is to make sure that astronauts live. It is a life support system, but other than what we have in the ISS, which largely still is a linear system, this is focused on making it a completely circular system. So without waste.
- Sometimes the astronauts in the ISS share a lettuce, but clearly this is far from enough to keep them alive.
- Urine is recycled, but what happens with the brown stuff? It gets collected and discarded and turned into shooting stars. Indeed… what a waste of resources!
- And this approach is completely unfeasible if you want to go to Mars. Why is that? Well, if you want to go to Mars, it means that crews will have to spend 800 to 1000 days in total isolation. For such a long mission, a crew of six members would need 30 tonnes of water, oxygen and food, which does not even include water for showering, washing dishes and clothes, nor the weight of packaging and cooling equipment. The most powerful launcher in the world today can only lift a payload of 9 tonnes to the moon. It just doesn’t add up.
- In other words: the challenge that the MELiSSA team has is to develop systems to recycle metabolic wastes (i.e. CO2, feces, urine) into consumables (i.e. water, oxygen and food). Ultimately, MELISSA’s goal is to make a completely regenerative and hence independent life support system for astronauts and future citizens in space. Its approach is by closely looking at nature.
- Many will have heard from the Biosphere II project in Arizona. Well, they too tried to look at nature. But that was exactly what they did: they were mostly inspired by the aesthetics of nature, so they included a mini-ocean, a mini-desert, etcetera. Clearly, a mini-ocean does not exist. Neither does a mini-desert. And the you put these two next to each other… things will go wrong.
- MELiSSA is also inspired by nature. But instead of trying to make an aesthetically rich representation of our planet, it is a scientific approach that takes the ecosystem of a lake as a starting point to design a completely circular, regenerative system. MELiSSA scientists and engineers are continuously looking and experimenting to fine-tune how microorganisms, chemicals, catalysts, algae and plants interact to process waste and deliver unending supplies of oxygen, water and food.
- The MELiSSA loop can be depicted as follows. You see 5 compartments here that constitute this loop.
- 1. The Liquefying Compartment - or the waste treatment compartment. This compartment is the collection pool for the human waste produced by the astronauts (faeces, urea) and the non-edible part of the higher plant compartment (straw, roots, …). Its essential task is to anaerobically transform this waste to carbon dioxide, hydrogen, ammonium, volatile fatty acids and minerals;
- 2. This all is fed into the second compartment - called the Photoheterotrophic Compartment – which further breaks down the rather unhealthy stuff coming from the first compartment;
- 3. So we arrive at the third compartment, which is called the Nitrification Compartment, and which - obviously - makes the nitrates which is needed to make plants grow;
- 4. Then the nitrates are fed into two compartments, one with algae - and one with plants - the so-called higher plant compartment. These compartments generate the food but is also very important in making oxygen and consuming CO2. Currently, the plants that are officially part of this higher plant compartment are wheat, tomato, potato, soybean, rice, spinach, onion and lettuce.
- Pretty amazing right, a completely regenerative system? Really sustainable and a perfect mindset to not only think of life on the red planet, but also as a perspective of living here on this planet. MELiSSA has been designing and optimising this system for the past 27 years, with many interesting spinoffs and applications for our own planet.
- So AstroPlant fits somewhere in this picture - and as the name suggests, it is part of the Higher Plant compartment. The challenge for us - with AstroPlant - is to perform a first evaluation of very large number of crops and cultivars in hydroponic conditions and looking at things like the i) Plant growth duration; ii) To characterise plant composition, iii) and to ultimately create mathematical plant growth models of a large number of species and cultivars. These models are used to predict how plants grow under specific circumstances.
- So, an important challenge is to test all potential varieties of crops for space. This is Lucie Poulet, and she is one of the researchers in the MELiSSA consortium involved in this research. To get the data for all potential crops and cultivars would take decades if she and her colleagues had to grow each plant themselves.
- So meet AstroPlant: AstroPlant - simply said - is a hydroponics system in which a plant grows with artificial light. It’s a box stuffed with sensors to be able to monitor the conditions in which the plant grows and to send this data to scientists working on plants in space. These AstroPlant kits should then be placed on numerous locations and facilitate the generation of a lot of useful data for these ESA scientists to make useful plant models. But AstroPlant is much more than that.. and let me try to explain that by a few of our design principles. Our first design principle was
- But AstroPlant is more than that, and let me try to explain that by a few of our design principles.
- Our first design principle was “Use design principles to boldly go and guide us where no one has been before” ok, well, that is done :)
- Secondly, we want to engage a new generation of space farmers through something called citizen science. Citizen science is “the collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public, typically as part of a collaborative project with professional scientists”.
- As you can see, there are different levels of engagement within citizen science. We do not want to use AstroPlant users as sensors and not engage them. That would be a wasted opportunity. We really want to engage a new generation of space farmers by teaching them about plants, about space, about electronics, about science in general. So the AstroPlant kit isn’t just sending out data to ESA.
- The AstroPlant users build the kit, and their kit will be collecting data, while they will be taught everything that represents the kit: this is electronics, plant science, space science, creativity, science, and more.
- The kits and its users will will generate data about a large variety of conditions in which the plants grow, ultimately leading to advanced plant models that are used to determine future crops for space. And who will design these future space gardens? Who will cultivate these crops? Or program the robots tending the crops? Yes, that will be a future generation of space farmers, and we’re going to engage them with this project.
- Our third principle goes to the heart of our business model and development approach. Open source is a principle that implies that we give open access to anyone to use, reuse, and remix the materials, content, and designs of AstroPlant. Why do we do this? To explain, I highlight one projects that inspired us: OpenROV.
- OpenROV was founded by a guy who wanted to find a gold treasure hidden in some underground and underwater cave that was highly inaccessible, and who had no other option than to build an underwater-robot or drone. He opened up his initial design, and asked people from all over the world to contribute and help out. In the end, he did not find the gold, but he managed to build a community of thousands of volunteers and hackers and scientists who have advanced his initial design and now thousands of open source underwater drones are roaming the oceans, lakes and seas to repair coral reefs, mapping fish populations, hunting for ship wrecks, and die-hard science. What we want to do, is to develop the basic infrastructure to allow others to form AstroPlant cells and start building a better AstroPlant, an AstroPlant for medicinal plants, an AstroPlant for potatoes, for specific tomato species, but maybe there will be unexpected uses for AstroPlant that bring benefits to this world. In the meantime, you build a community of experts and supporters.
- The basic principle of MELiSSA is to let nothing go to waste. And similarly, we are dedicated to minimise our impact on the environment.
- So to minimise electronic waste, we are exploring possibilities to replace parts. This has the benefit that you keep your data reliable, and have a process in place that also allows upgrading. Inspired by the interesting ‘headphones as a service’ model by some guys here in Utrecht, we want to introduce a subscription-based model for AstroPlant, where you get the necessary support to setup your AstroPlant and, crucially, keep it running as long as possible. Sensors like a Ph sensor or EC sensor are likely to become less reliable after a year, and so a subscription-based model prevents this problem because the service includes the replacement of parts. Another benefit of a subscription model is the more continuous generation of income that allows us to create better products and services, so think of new educational challenges, better explanatory videos, or translations into new languages.
- Back to AstroPlant - How are things progressing? Our objective with AstroPlant was to grow a community in sync with building a meaningful and useful product and service.
- Through our events, workshops, and meetups we developed a community, and from this community a few people emerged who deserve recognition for the efforts that have led to the development of this first proper AstroPlant prototype.
- We have a great team with engineers and designers, many are here in the room.
- [Michel and GJ, Christophe, Christel, Raffaella] And of course the priceless advice by Michel and Gerrit Jan and of course our research partners at MELiSSA and ESA Christophe, Christel, and Raffaella. And others.
- So there we go..
- First the UX. Alisha and Daniel have been working hard on designing an engaging user experience, as you can see on these screenshots.. The app that we are developing aims to educate a new generation of space farmers about these relevant topics such as biology, space science, hydroponics, electronics, and more.
- And of course, we have a first real working prototype, which you can see here. It contains most of the required sensors, and they work, and the data is collected and sent to the cloud. Great job by Sidney and Thomas.
- To sum it up: AstroPlant is two things. It is an open source hydroponics-based plant lab stuffed with sensors collecting data about how plants grow. ESA uses this data to develop mathematical plant models that predict how plants grow in different circumstances. Kits are open source and DISTRIBUTED across the world in classrooms, grow rooms and living rooms, and give rise to great learning opportunities. We need you to FEED FUTURE CITIES ON MARS, so if you’re interested in space farming, are you an educator, or just fancy our project, please hang around and let’s see how you can get involved.