EDEN ISS Space Greenhouse

NASA OSDR OSD-895 • PMC7264257
Antarctic Space-Analog Testbed • Neumayer Station III

Biomass Production & Controlled Environment Crop Yields

During the 2018 Antarctic winter campaign, the EDEN ISS Future Exploration Greenhouse (FEG) evaluated fresh vegetable cultivation across 12.5 m² of growing area under a single compromise climate to demonstrate safe, automated food production for human missions to the Moon and Mars.

Repository: NASA OSDR OSD-895 (LSDS-160) Publication: Zabel et al. (2020) Front. Plant Sci. Study DOI: 10.26030/8556-mr78 Theme: CoSE Palette • Dual CC-BY 4.0 / MIT
Total Fresh Harvest 🥬
268.0kg
Produced over 286 mission days in Antarctica
Cultivation Footprint 📐
12.5m²
38 multi-tier independently lit growing trays
Facility Productivity ⚡
75.0g/m²/d
Rises to 89.0 g/m²/d excluding slow trial peppers
Winter Crew Fed 👨‍🚀
10Crew
Supplied Neumayer Station III overwintering team
Horticultural Performance

Interactive Crop Productivity Explorer

Explore yield rates, growth cycle durations, and dry mass ratios across 19 evaluated crop cohorts.

Photobiology Experiment

Lighting Intensity (Arugula)

Impact of PPFD: 600 µmol vs. 330 µmol/m²/s at 16 cm.

Doubling light intensity on Arugula boosted daily productivity by 49% (from 126 to 189 g/m²/day).

Nutrient Delivery Subsystem

Bulk Solutions (Table 2)

Macronutrient balance: Tank 1 (Leafy) vs. Tank 2 (Fruit).

Tank 2 Ca²⁺ was increased from 0.54 to 0.65 mol/100L during the mission to eliminate tomato blossom end rot.

Analog Benchmarks

Space Analog Facility Productivity Comparison

Comparison of EDEN ISS daily yields against other closed-loop space crop testbeds (Table 10 of Zabel et al. 2020).

Mission Life-Support Sizing

ECLSS Diet & Growing Area Calculator

Estimate the greenhouse cultivation footprint required to supply fresh bio-regenerative nutrition for crewed space exploration.

Astronaut Crew Size 6 Astronauts
Daily Fresh Produce Target 100 g/day/person
Mission Duration 500 days
Crop Selection Strategy
Required Growing Area
8.0 m²
Total Biomass Harvest
300 kg
Daily Water Turnover
22.4 L/d
Inedible Root/Stem Waste
12.6 kg
Calculation updates automatically based on EDEN ISS measured harvest parameters.
Frictionless Tabular Data

FAIR Dataset Explorer

Showing 19 of 19 crops

⬇ CSV ⬇ JSON ⬇ Data Package
Crop & Cultivar ↕ Category ↕ Variety ↕ Harvest ↕ Productivity (g/m²/d) ↕ Fresh Yield (kg/m²) ↕ Cycle (Days) ↕ Dry Wt % ↕ Light ↕ Seed Source ↕
Attribution & Citation

Academic Attribution

Please cite both the primary Frontiers research article and the NASA Open Science Data Repository record.

@article{zabel2020biomass,
  title={Biomass Production of the EDEN ISS Space Greenhouse in Antarctica During the 2018 Experiment Phase},
  author={Zabel, Paul and Zeidler, Conrad and Vrakking, Vincent and Dorn, Matthew and Schubert, Daniel},
  journal={Frontiers in Plant Science},
  volume={11},
  pages={656},
  year={2020},
  publisher={Frontiers},
  doi={10.3389/fpls.2020.00656},
  pmcid={PMC7264257}
}

@dataset{osd895_eden_iss,
  title={OSD-895: Biomass Production of the EDEN ISS Space Greenhouse in Antarctica During the 2018 Experiment Phase},
  author={Zabel, Paul and Zeidler, Conrad and Vrakking, Vincent and Dorn, Matthew and Schubert, Daniel},
  year={2020},
  publisher={NASA Open Science Data Repository},
  doi={10.26030/8556-mr78}
}