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Students from 13 European universities, including EPFL, have
joined forces to design a lunar habitat as part of IGLUNA, a
project sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA) and
headed by the Swiss Space Center. The students’ work will
be put on display in June on a glacier in Zermatt
There’s something romantic about the idea of living on the
moon. But a huge number of human and technological
challenges will have to be overcome first. These challenges
are just what students from 13 universities in nine different
European countries have been working on since the start
of the academic year. They are members of a pioneering
project called IGLUNA that is being run by the EPFL-based
Swiss Space Center under the European Space Agency’s
ESA_Lab pilot project.
In mid-January – halfway through the project – the
participants met up at CERN. All 19 teams, including four
from EPFL, attended. In addition to providing progress
reports, they were able to fine-tune their work thanks to
discussions with the other teams. Their goal is to have a
seamless fit among the systems they are developing, as they
work together towards a common goal: to demonstrate the
feasibility of creating a habitat in the ice of the moon’s poles
where astronauts could be housed for short- or long-term
missions. The results of their year-long collaborative effort
will be put on public display in June, in one of the cavities of
the ice palace in the Petit Cervin glacier in Zermatt.
“This initiative is very inspiring,” says Bernard Foing, the
IGLUNA project supervisor. “Not only is it teaching people
about space-related issues, it is also a platform for developing
innovative technologies and solutions while laying the
groundwork for a Europe-wide scientific collaboration. And
it’s really capturing the imagination of young people.” In
addition to his work on IGLUNA, Foing serves as an adviser
to the ESA and is a professor at VU University in Amsterdam.
All aspects of human life
Creating a long-term habitat on the moon is fraught with
challenges. “That’s why this particular goal was selected,”
says Tatiana Benavides, project coordinator at the Swiss
Space Center. “If you want to build a livable environment –
especially one that’s far from earth – you need to take into
account all aspects of human life. This includes producing
food, energy and oxygen, building shelter, providing tools
and enabling communications.”
At EPFL, a PhD student in materials science is exploring
the possibility of printing 3D objects – such as an ice saw
– within the habitat. A team of environmental engineering
students from EPFL and UNIL are putting their heads
together to come up with a long-lasting and self-operating
greenhouse for growing vegetables. And students from
EPFL’s architecture and civil engineering program either
have a hand in designing the habitat’s structure – a vault
made from carefully assembled blocks – or are part of a
virtual reality team whose goal is to create an interactive
virtual environment with indoor surroundings.
Teams at other universities are hard at work on their own
University students
full of ideas for living
on the moon
66 l New-Tech Magazine Europe