Abstract
Small satellite technologies, particularly CubeSats, are enabling breakthrough research in space. Over the past 15 years, NASA Ames Research Center has developed and flown half a dozen biological CubeSats in low Earth orbit (LEO) to conduct space biology and astrobiology research investigating the effects of the space environment on microbiological organisms. These studies of the impacts of radiation and reduced gravity on cellular processes include dose-dependent interactions with antimicrobial drugs, measurements of gene expression and signaling, and assessment of radiation damage. BioSentinel, the newest addition to this series, will be the first deep space biological CubeSat, its heliocentric orbit extending far beyond the radiation-shielded environment of low Earth orbit. BioSentinel's 4U biosensing payload, the first living biology space experiment ever conducted beyond the Earth-Moon system, will use a microbial bioassay to assess repair of radiation-induced DNA damage in eukaryotic cells over a duration of 6-12 months. Part of a special collection of articles focused on BioSentinel and its science mission, this article describes the design, development, and testing of the biosensing payload's microfluidics and optical systems, highlighting improvements relative to previous CubeSat life-support and bioanalytical measurement technologies.
Highlights
Since the beginning of space exploration, experiments to understand the impact of space travel on humans have been performed primarily in low Earth orbit (LEO); such experiments continue to this day on the International Space Station (ISS)
NASA Ames Research Center has produced a series of successful biological CubeSats that have run microbiology experiments in LEO
BioSentinel leverages many of the lessons learned from these previous missions, but with significant upgrades to the hardware to support experimentation in deep space, beyond LEO
Summary
Since the beginning of space exploration, experiments to understand the impact of space travel on humans have been performed primarily in low Earth orbit (LEO); such experiments continue to this day on the International Space Station (ISS). The second payload, implemented on a single printed-circuit board, is a miniature spectrometer to measure and compile the linear-energy-transfer (LET) characteristics of individual radiation events (Kroupa et al, 2015), that is, a continuous cataloging of ionizing impacts on its detector by particles or photons; this system computes total ionizing dose (TID) This will enable the cumulative history of BioSentinel’s physical radiation environment over the elapsed duration of the mission to be compared and correlated with the biological effects recorded by the BioSensor payload when a given experimental time point is obtained (Ricco et al, 2020)
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