AMADEE-20 – with dietetics to Mars

The Austrian Space Forum (Österreichisches Weltraum Forum, head: Gernot Grömer) requested the support of the University of Applied Sciences for Health Professions Upper Austria now for the second time since the last project 2018.
The upcoming program AMADEE-20 will take place in fall 2020 in Israel and will cover a five week research in the desert to simulate the conditions on the surface of Mars.

For this research program, a five-week meal plan is developed by Petra Eberharter. As a dietitian she also includes caloric and nutritional values due to the recommendations considering both macro and micronutrients. Since the research team is from all over the world with different ethnic views and religions, the plan is designed mostly vegetarian or vegan.

A team of two students (Hannah Wagner and Florian Schatzdorfer) of the bachelor programme Dietetics was asked to write their bachelor thesis about the sensory evaluation of the developed meal plan. This evaluation will take place within the scope of a dress rehearsal in July in Innsbruck. All analog astronauts of AMADEE-20 are expected to participate within this food tasting ceremony. The second thesis will cover statistic analysis of anthropometric and laboratory parameters of the participants after the five weeks took place.

The head of the bachelor programme Dietetics, Klaus Nigl, is responsible for organisation, planning and cooperation with all project partners.

• Partner: ÖWF, Dr. Gernot Grömer, Petra Eberharter BSc. MSc. nutr. med.