Thomas Riedel
Leonie Bensch

This is the ignite episode of „XR in Space“, a Spatial Realities podcast-special.

Imagine a shadow so black, it could be a hole. And if you drop something into it, it’s practical gone.

That’s a realistic scenario for future moon missions. As the moon has no atmosphere, light is not dispersed nor weekend at air molecules leading to brutal light conditions you can not imagine as an earthling. Starting 2030 we build the Artemis moon base from where we might conduct complex missions not only on the surface of the moon itself but also to start our journey to Mars.

And so that astronauts do not step into a shadow which is actually a hole in the ground, stumble and damage their spacesuit or instruments, an augmented reality interface could be helpful.

Leonie Bensch, Doctoral Candidate at the European Space Agency, researches exactly that. In her research she develops AR scenarios in Virtual Reality (VR) to test designs and gather feedback before developing costly physical prototypes. For Example she examines how a grid might help to understand the topographical feature of the moon surface or how far an object is away. No easy task as safety and reliability has top priority in space.

Leonie is not only a researcher at ESA. As one of three conference chairs she organized the Space CHI 4.0 conference which took place June 23-24, 2025 at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne. This podcast-special was mainly inspired by that conference, as there were many inspiring talks and keynotes and even two ESA Astronauts taking part.

Shownotes

XR in Space Episode:

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