Team VITA selected for Orbit Your Thesis!
In brief
A new team from Nottingham University has been selected for the Orbit Your Thesis! programme. Team VITA will be designing and developing a cell-free transcription and translation experiment intended to produce on-demand proteins. In the long term, such technology could produce personalised medical attention for long-duration space flight by allowing on-demand therapeutic protein production, in the short term the students will focus on testing the technology on the International Space Station with fluorescent proteins.
In-depth
Orbit Your Thesis! is an educational programme offered by ESA Academy for students to operate their self-developed experiment in the International Space Station. Aboard the station, the payload is integrated in the ICE Cubes Facilities operated by Space Applications Services situated in the Columbus module. The first edition started in 2018 with the selection of the AIM “Artery In Microgravity” team followed by OSCAR-QUBE in 2020. Now it is time for a third team to join the ranks.
The process of selection starts with the call for proposals after which interested teams can send in their letter of intent. Later teams are required to deliver a data pack that provides a board of experts with the experiment proposal, letter of endorsement from their universities, and technical documentation to assure that their payload is compliant with the ICE Cubes facility.
This year’s selection workshop, like last, was held online. After deliberating with the selection board, the decision was made to accept team VITA to the first phase of the Orbit Your Thesis! programme. The board was impressed with the team’s enthusiasm and unanimously agreed that participation of this team would be of great educational value to the students.
VITA (Visualizing In-space TXTL Astropharmaceuticals) is a student-led project based at the University of Nottingham in the UK, they set out to produce a flight-ready experiment payload that can demonstrate the easy and reliable long-term stowage of freeze-dried synthetic biology on a spaceflight. With the goal of rehydrating their samples to produce analogue pharmaceutical proteins which they intend to analyse through fluorescent spectroscopy and imaging while on the Station. More thorough inspections will be done when the experiment makes its way back to Earth and to Nottingham University School of Pharmacy.
ESA Academy, ESA Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration directorate and Space Applications Services are looking forward to working with the team and stay tuned for more news on the progress of our new student colleagues!
If this spiked your interest in the hands-on programmes offered by ESA Academy or if you have an experiment you would like to perform in altered gravity environments, then click here to see all the open calls that are available for student at ESA Academy.