THESEUS Website
The activity has ended on 31 March 2012. The final roadmap and Expert Groups reports can be downloaded from the THESEUS official web site at:
The THESEUS Coordination and Support Action has received funding from the European Community’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n°242482.
THESEUS Consortium
Rationale and Objectives
Past space missions in Earth orbit have demonstrated that men can survive and work in space for long durations. However, there are pending technological, medical and psychological issues to be solved before adventuring in longer duration space missions (protection against ionizing radiation, psychological issues, behaviour and performances, prevention of bone loss, etc). Furthermore technological breakthroughs, e.g. in life support systems and recycling technologies are required to reduce the costs of these expeditions to acceptable levels. Solving these issues will need scientific and technological breakthroughs of interest for clinical and industrial applications and also allow identifying the relevance of these questions to health issues on Earth. Despite existing ESA or NASA studies or roadmaps Europe still has no roadmap approved by the European scientific and industrial communities.
The objective of THESEUS is to develop an integrated life sciences research roadmap enabling European human space exploration in synergy with the ESA strategy, taking advantage of the expertise available in Europe and identifying the potential of non space applications and dual research and development.
- Objective 1: Identify disciplinary research priorities;
- Objective 2: Focus on fields with high terrestrial application potential;
- Objective 3: Build a European network as the core of this strategy.
THESEUS Expert Groups
The basis of the activity is the setting-up and coordination of 14 disciplinary Expert Groups (EGs) composed by key European and international experts in their field, a particular attention has been given to ensure that complementary expertises are gathered in the EGs. THESEUS EGs are asked to develop their activities and recommendations based on the scenario proposed by ESA Space Exploration Architecture. This scenario describes the following steps i) Human presence in Low Earth Orbit, ii) return to the Moon and iii) Human Exploration of Mars. In this context, EGs will closely cooperate with the ESA Topical Teams. THESEUS Expert Groups are mandated to:
- Identify key research questions to answer the challenges of human exploration mission;
- Consider and identify research priorities for the development of efficient countermeasures;
- Identify how considering these issues are relevant to health issues on Earth;
- Define the questions to be addressed to the scientific community via an online consultation;
- Identify biomedical applications;
- Provide high quality inputs to the development of an integrated roadmap.
EGs are clustered according to their focus and each cluster will be implemented through disciplinary Work Packages
Top
ESF Contact Points
Top
