| Summary: | The EDEN ISS project is aimed at testing key technologies in view of space operations. The Mobile Test Facility represents a platform to verify the possibility to manage plant growth and safe food production in extreme conditions. But the race to space is done of small steps having the objective to reach intermediates goals, like for example the understanding on how the plants can be grown and managed in a closed ambient and with conditions that are different from those experience on hearth (for example under low gravity conditions, with artificial lighting conditions, etc). That includes the verification and the validation of the technical solutions that have to be designed to work in these conditions. For example the distribution of water and nutrients to the plants is a critical items in the absence of gravity, because the water, the air and the nutrient solutions distribute in different way. Several experiments are therefore required to increase the knowledge of the plant and system behaviour in space and to solve all the technical uncertainties in order to be ready for a complex mission that foresees the production of food on an extra-terrestrial outpost. For that reason, in the EDEN ISS project, a small laboratory has been implemented as first step on the way that to design and realize a scientific payload for plant experiments on board of the ISS. This laboratory, called RUCOLA (Rack-like Unit for Consistent on-Orbit Leafy crops Availability), has been designed looking at a future integration in the new version of the European Drawer Rack (EDR MKII) on board of the Columbus, the European Module of the International Space Station. The present document has the scope to follow-up the lessons learnt from the laboratory and the Antarctica test campaigns by outlining the following aspects: Identification of the preliminary architecture of a plant growth rack-size experiment on the ISS – the RUCOLA system (Chapter 1) Identification of the RUCOLA flight system preliminary physical configuration (Chapter 2) ...
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