The doctoral fellowship programme INPhINIT ”la Caixa” is devoted to attracting talented Early-Stage Researchers of any nationality to pursue their PhD studies in the best Spanish and Portuguese research centres and units with excellence distinction.

Research Project / Research Group Description

The research project is double fold: scientific and biological/technological. On one
hand, the scientific goal will be to use the worldwide network of the BOOTES robotic
telescope to detect transient lunar phenomena, to characterise the size, speed, and
frequency of these events. The impacts on the moon and their ejecta will threaten any
life-support system built on the Moon so this analysis is very important.
On the other hand, their biological implications for advanced control systems and
habitability on the moon will be studied. In particular, the work will be focused on
encapsulated and pressurised habitats for plants on the moon to better understand
advanced control systems and their implementation in small autonomous capsules to
be used as greenhouses to study future agriculture and habitability in the Moon (as a
result of a collaboration with Dr. Zheng Chen, Wrexham Glyndwr University). In
previous publications, scientists understood how plants are stressed due to different
temperatures in different parts of the plants. In addition to that, it has to be considered
that the plant also has stimulations under different light, cosmic radiation, soil
interaction or gravity. That is why, if it is possible to control the stress created by a
temperature divergence, it will be easier to better understand how different gravity
conditions will affect the plant´s growth.

Job position description

The PhD will be carried out based on the existing and long-standing collaboration
between two research groups at IAA-CSIC led by A. J. Castro-Tirado (Robotic Astronomy) and J. L. Ortiz (Solar System’s science). The main tasks that will be
performed are:
-The recording of flash impacts on the moon surface from different locations and
different filters with a network of robotic telescopes worldwide, coordinating the
different observations by means of an intelligent scheduler.
-The study of advanced control systems (engineering definition and creation). The
purpose of this is to be autonomously monitoring and regulating the plant´s
temperature while reading the information provided by the different sensors.
-Their biological implications for advanced control systems and habitability on the
moon.