Biosentinel Deep Space Mission
BioSentinel was launched as a secondary payload on the space launch system (SLS) Artemis I mission on November 16, 2022, and is currently in a heliocentric orbit at approx. 36 million kms away from the Earth (as of April 1, 2024).
BioSentinel builds and improves upon a rich legacy of biological CubeSat technologies. The iterative advancement of biological CubeSats permits pioneering science, providing insight into the biological risks of long-duration space flight, and establishing exciting possibilities for innovative life science and human exploration of deep space.
Payload installation int he Ares 1 SLS Booster — NASA
To date, Ames Research Center has developed and operated a series of biological CubeSats in LEO. BioSentinel builds on the legacy of PharmaSat, O/OREOS, and EcAMSat, and is NASA’s first biological CubeSat to probe interplanetary space.
The BioSentinel mission has two primary objectives: (1) to develop the capability to support biological organisms in deep interplanetary space, and (2) to characterize the deep space radiation environment and its effects on biological organisms.
The BioSentinel satellite is composed of two sections, one containing the scientific payloads, and a spacecraft bus equipped with solar panel arrays, batteries, micropropulsion system, star tracker navigation system, transponder, antennas, and command and data handling systems. The two payloads are the microfluidic-based BioSensor instrument and a radiation detector.
The BioSensor instrument carries the budding yeast S. cerevisiae to assay biological responses to accumulated doses of deep space radiation. Despite over a billion years of evolution separating yeast from humans, we share hundreds of homologous genes that govern essential cellular processes, including DNA damage and repair.
Yeast cells are loaded and desiccated inside microfluidic cards (18 cards with 16 microwells each). Each fluidic card is comprised of fluidic microchannels to allow the influx of nutrients and efflux of waste, and heating elements that enable yeast growth. Each card stack also contains optical source and detector boards. The card stacks are mounted onto two fluidic manifolds (nine cards per manifold) connected to tubing, reagent bags, pumps, bubble traps, calibration cells, and electronics, all of which fit into the Biosensor aluminum enclosure. An identical BioSensor instrument launched to the ISS in December 2021, and returned to Earth in August 2022.
The second science payload is a TimePix-based radiation spectrometer, which will allow for the correlation of physical in situ dosimetry with the biological response to radiation. This spectrometer measures both the linear energy transfer (LET) and total ionizing dose of radiation exposures. The BioSentinel project was supported primarily by NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD).
For more information see the BioSentinel mission page
Astrobiology, space biology,
