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.