CubeSats set to tackle living systems, effects of deep space radiation

Abstract

Human beings will soon be heading into deep space again, decades after the Apollo missions. Out there, beyond Earth’s magnetic shield, they will be exposed to intense radiation for months or years, a cosmic onslaught that could cause all sorts of damage. But a fleet of tiny bio-laboratories may offer up insights that will help protect future astronauts. BioSentinel, seen here in a conceptual drawing, is the first CubeSat aiming to investigate the pernicious effects of deep-space radiation. Image courtesy of NASA. These intrepid explorers are CubeSats, built up from 10 × 10 × 10-centimeter units, in a somewhat standardized format originally laid out in 1999. CubeSats are cheap and quick to build, making them popular with telecommunications companies and scientists alike. In May, for example, a small fleet of CubeSats, called QB50, set off from the International Space Station to explore a little known layer of the Earth’s outer atmosphere between 100 and 300 kilometers in altitude. And now these tiny satellites are being adapted to pave the way for human missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond. These marvels of miniaturization will squeeze in samples, nutrients, plumbing, and even microscopes, to send back images and other data on suffering cells millions of miles away—all to help us understand and maybe reduce the pernicious effects of space radiation. The first of these CubeSats should go up a year or two from now. BioSentinel is a six-liter spacecraft built at NASA’s Ames research center in Moffett Field, California (1). “We at Ames have been the only ones clever or foolish enough to do live biology experiments on CubeSats,” says payload technologist Tony Ricco. So far the team has flown four biological CubeSat missions. One, O/OREOS, looked at radiation damage in a spore-forming bacterium, comparing their growth with identical samples held …