Coordinated by the departments of Mechanical Engineering, Materials Sciences and Biology at TU Darmstadt, the exclusively virtual INSPIRED 2021 summer event brought together space exploration enthusiasts from all over the globe to design a sustainable and efficient greenhouse facility on Mars.

Fifty students took on the challenge and participated in the Virtual Team Project, 43 of them from the Unite! partner universities, TU Darmstadt, Aalto University, Grenoble INP – UGA, Politecnico di Torino, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Universidade de Lisboa. Additionally, the bespoke virtual environment of INSPIRED hosted seven overseas participants (representing the USA, Brazil and Singapore), thus facilitating synchronous and asynchronous teamwork across multiple time zones and continents. A total of 20 different disciplines were represented and the students competed in six interdisciplinary teams.

The jury, consisting of professors from TU Darmstadt, Universidade de Lisboa and the seventh Unite! partner, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, were very impressed by all proposed “Extraterrestrial Greenhouse” concepts. After much deliberation, they chose Team 1 “Amaltheia” as the winning team:

Arda Karaşahin, Politecnico di Torino, Engineering & Management

Daniela Cuffs, University of Lisbon, Biochemistry

Jan Scherff, TUDa, Mechanical and Process Engineering

Louis Ebermann, TUDa, Mechanical and Process Engineering

Marie Neumann, TUDa, Materials Science

Marwan Kaufmann, TUDa, Biomolecular Engineering

Pia Lenhardt, TUDa, Mechanical and Process Engineering

Prerthan Munireternam, National University of Singapore, Computer Science & Physics

(Team mentor: Leslie Hirsch)

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