Ricerc@Sapienza

The Sapienza Space Systems and Space Surveillance Laboratory (S5Lab) at Sapienza University of Rome is in the recent years carrying out a multiplicity of University nano-satellite projects, with the design, development, launch and operations of their CubeSats. The development of a satellite is a key-importance chance for University students to gain soft skills, practical knowledge and to follow a complete development cycle of a spaceborne object.

This work describes the design, fabrication and test of a lab-on-chip device along with its front-end electronics for the execution of experiments on bacterial cultures on nanosatellite missions. The motivations for such systems lie in the need to improve the quantification of the effects of the space environment on living organisms and facilitate the development of countermeasures to mitigate them.

The study and quantification of the effects of the space environment on human body is a primary task for future manned deep space missions. The risk models for radiation exposures incurred by astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, have different limitations due to the difficulty to have terrestrial parallels on which to base risk estimates. Indeed, no terrestrial sources fully reproduce the deep space energy spectrum and the multi directional flux of the cosmic radiation.