<p>Clean indoor air is a necessity, in the past opening a window or supplying outdoor air would suffice for removing indoor contaminated air. As humans live in more dense neighborhoods or urban areas, the need for energy efficient clean indoor air is important. As outdoor air pollution increases, a Biowall is a device to improve aesthetics and clean indoor air by pulling air through the root zone of plants in a loosely packed growth media. The Biowall is a sustainable supplement to a single use air filter. For this research a small Biowall was designed, fabricated, tested, and installed in the Children’s wing of a public library. The airflow simulation and watering for the Biowall was explored using Autodesk CFD to simulate the airflow through growth media and identify a hole pattern to distribute airflow evenly through the plant trays. Various watering line designs were also tested until the rectangular design proved to be more balanced at distributing the water evenly to the growth media. Finally, the air cleaning ability of the Biowall was tested using a Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) test to quantify the cleaning rate. The Biowall provided 12 cfm of clean air, or about 2 cfm/sq ft of plant tray area.  </p>

<p> Orbital Debris is a growing challenge for the Space Industry. The increasing density of derelict objects in high-value orbital regimes is resulting in more conjunction warnings and break-up events with cascading repercussions on active satellites and spacecraft. The recent rapid growth of the commercial space industry, in particular proliferated satellite constellations, has placed orbital debris remediation at the forefront of Space Industry efforts. The need to remove existing debris, combined with a growing demand for active satellite life extension services, has created an emerging market for space logistics, in particular spacecraft capable of rendezvous and docking, orbital refueling, debris deorbiting, or object relocation. This market has seen numerous companies emerge with multi-purpose on-orbit servicing platforms. This ecosystem poses technological, economical, and policy questions to decision-makers looking to acquire platforms or invest in technologies and requires a System-of-Systems approach to determine mission and system concepts of merit. An open-source modeling, analysis, and simulation software toolbox has been developed which enables rapid early-stage analysis and design of diverse fleets of on-orbit servicing platforms, with a specific emphasis on active debris removal applications. The toolbox provides fetching and processing of real-time orbital catalog data, clustering and scoring of high-value debris targets, flexible and efficient multi-vehicle multi-objective time-varying routing optimization, and fleet-level lifecycle cost estimation. The toolbox is applied to a diverse sample of promising commercial platforms to enable government decision-makers to make sound investment and acquisition decisions to support the development of ADR technologies, missions, and companies. </p>

<p> </p> <p>There are several challenges that occur when creating extraterrestrial structures that are not relevant to terrestrial applications. The Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitat Institute is a NASA funded research project focused on developing resilient lunar habitats. In order to develop these deep-space structures, many considerations have to be made to account for scenarios that are not relevant to Earth. Such scenarios include meteorite impacts, moonquakes, radiation, and moon dust accumulation. To observe possible consequences of these disruptions, RETHi established a modular coupled virtual testbed to monitor the effects of different deep-space related situations. MCVT is a computer model of a lunar habitat that uses a system-of-systems approach to examine the impacts of these scenarios. Currently, MCVT is developing methods to confront these extraterrestrial situations by utilizing robotic agents and expanding upon a variety of safety responses to increase resiliency.  RETHi also utilizes a cyber physical testbed to run cyber-physical experiments to validate the approaches used in MCVT. </p> <p><br></p> <p>One of the numerous models in MCVT is the Habitat Interior Environment Model. HIEM monitors the interior environment of the lunar structure using physics-based calculations and inputs from its surroundings. There are three main disturbances that directly affect the interior environment—fire within the dome, meteorite impacts, and airlock failure. Such scenarios either increase or decrease the temperature and pressure. This data is then forwarded to other subsystems for further evaluation. HIEM can be remodeled to fit the pressure box in the cyber physical testbed. By doing so, it is then possible to validate the pressure leakage calculations used in HIEM using experimental data. HIEM is specifically designed to the lunar habitat currently in development; however, the model can be refitted to a variety of applications such as terrestrial, aerospace, space, and marine. </p>