Academic Research

The scientific foundation of the programme

Academic Research is the ESA-funded work underpinning everything else in this section: the research contracts ESA awards, through the MELiSSA Space Research Programme, to the MELiSSA partner institutions. Each contract targets a specific gap in the programme’s roadmap, whether in microbial physiology, bioreactor engineering, system modelling or process control, and the results feed directly into the flight and ground demonstration work described elsewhere in these pages.

This is what keeps MELiSSA a genuine consortium rather than a single laboratory’s project: ESA sets the scientific priorities, and the partner universities and research centres compete for the contracts and carry out the work, publishing their findings as MELiSSA technical notes, searchable in full in our Library.

More in The MELiSSA Program
Consortium Scientific Concept How It All Began Research & Development Flight Experiments Ground Demonstration Terrestrial Applications Education & Communication