MELiSSA and Russian institutes, 20 years of a discrete but published collaboration
Abstract
Future manned missions to Moon or Mars, private or public, will be an international adventure. One of the challenges is the development of a robust closed life support system to sustain this international crew or potentially community. It is therefore crucial that system and sub-systems are developed in a collaborative mind more that with a prime to subs-contractors approach, where pieces are developed from different part of the world and only assembled at the end. This collaborative approach as the advantage to create motivation of all actors, more commitments and to technically reduced the risk with a better understanding of the distributed sub-systems.Over the 30 years of MELiSSA project, almost 20 years of them have seen collaborations with Russian institutes: - IBP Krasnoyarsk and - IBMP, Moscow. Initiated around 2000, in a difficult historical context and almost total ignorance of respective activities and culture, this collaboration has brought several successes, now published in international journals.More than a political declaration, this collaboration was more a human desire to discover, listen to existing experience and to collaborate for a common objective: the development of closed life support system. Started much before any European activity in Life Support, Russian research has accumulated a lot of experience either from Isolation manned facilities, flight hardware development and operation. At the contrary, started from almost non-European experience, the MELiSSA project benefitted of a virgin field.This collaboration mainly covered the 3 axes of MELiSSA project: - Basic &D, - Flight Experiment and Isolation campaign via ground analogs ( i.e. BIOS and MELiSSA Pilot Plant). The objectives of this presentation is of course to present the collaboration activities : Soil Like Substrat, Mobilisatie, Message, Nitrimel, BIOS upgrade, Higher plant activities, microbial contamination,.. and the obtained results as well as to remind the historical context of this collaboration: - the general constraints, the difference and interest of the cultural and sociological approach. As a conclusion, this paper will summarize the main obstacles, which have been faced and overcome as well as the reasons why this collaboration continue.
- Publication:
-
42nd COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- July 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018cosp...42E1940L