Читать книгу Astrobiology - Charles S. Cockell - Страница 115

Affiliation: European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), European Space Agency (ESA), The Netherlands

What was your first degree? Environmental Science at The University of the West of England, Bristol.

What do you study? I work as a science coordinator (Research Fellow) for the European Space Agency in the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in The Netherlands. My primary role is to support research scientists and ensure that requirements for carrying out biology experiments in space are defined, understood, and met by our engineering and operations teams.

What science questions do you address? The astrobiology experiments that I am involved in organizing address a range of physiological and morphological endpoints that can provide information about life in the universe, particularly the limits of life in extreme environments. All of the projects I am assigned to are run on the International Space Station. They can be divided into two main categories of exposure to space conditions, internal and external. The internal experiments predominantly address effects of weightlessness (microgravity) while external ones expose samples to full space conditions (albeit within Earth's magnetic field but outside of the atmosphere). Such work must be carried out in space, as many of the conditions (and a combination of them) cannot be replicated on Earth.

How did you get involved in astrobiology research? As part of my PhD in environmental radioactivity, I studied biological effects of low-dose ionizing radiation on Earth and later, in samples that had been in space. I chose to study the effects in a well-established plant model (Arabidopsis thaliana) and used analytical techniques such as morphometrics and physiological assays that can be applied to other organisms. When searching for a postdoctoral position, I focused on trying to find a job where specialist research knowledge could be useful in examining fundamental science questions relating to various organisms in space.