Post by Florian Kehl
Director Space Research Initiatives at ETH Zurich Space. Former NASA JPL, Head of the Space Instruments Group at the University of Zurich, and Swiss Project Manager for ESA Space Telescope ARRAKIHS.
🛰 Hooray 👽! My team at ETH Zürich | Space and my former colleages at CSEM have been selected by the European Space Agency - ESA to take on an exciting challenge: exploring how tiny “laboratories on a chip” could support future missions that search for potential biosignatures beyond Earth. Since missions to places like Mars, Europa or Enceladus cannot carry full-scale laboratories, instruments must be small, energy-efficient and extremely robust. Lab-on-chip concepts address this by moving tiny amounts of liquid through channels in a chip and checking them for chemical and biological clues that could hint at habitability or life. In the one-year SpaceChip study, ETH Zürich and CSEM will analyse and compare different detection approaches, assess how they could work on a chip, and study how these platforms might fit into future ESA mission scenarios. The collaboration brings together complementary expertise from ETH and CSEM across science, engineering, and microtechnology. If successful, SpaceChip will provide ESA with a roadmap for next-generation lab-on-chip technologies that could one day help explore some of the most promising places for life in our solar system. Audrey Aebi, Petra Dittrich, Morteza Aramesh, Stefan Wismer, Caterina Biffi, Marko Dorrestijn, Rafael Pennese, Samantha Paoletti , Gilles Weder , Noa Schmid , Christian Beyer #ETHZ #CSEM #OceanWorlds #LoC #LifeDetection #Space #Enceladus #ESA
