Meet the BEXUS team: HELIA
“It turns out that keeping cells alive in the stratosphere takes more than ideas and engineering. It takes a like-minded team turning different disciplines into one working experiment.” HELIA team
The High-Altitude Exposure Laboratory for Incubation and Analysis (HELIA) aims to study how biological cells respond to radiation in the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere. HELIA is a student team from the University of Nottingham, UK.
At an altitude of 20–30 km, within the stratosphere, the atmosphere provides much less protection from ultraviolet and secondary ionising radiation than it does at ground level. This makes the stratosphere a valuable environment for space-biology research and future human space exploration.
HELIA experiment
HELIA aims to produce reliable biological data by separating the effects of radiation from other stressors associated with high-altitude conditions. It does this by:
- maintaining near-sea-level pressure inside the experiment
- regulating the temperature around the biological samples
- controlling humidity and atmospheric composition
- preventing sample dehydration
- comparing radiation-exposed samples with shielded control samples
To achieve this, HELIA keeps the cells inside a compact, pressurised “skylab” incubator mounted on the BEXUS gondola. The internal environment is maintained at approximately 1 atm, with active temperature regulation and continuous monitoring of pressure, humidity and gas composition.
Eight cell-culture flasks are carried on board:
- Four flasks are exposed to stratospheric ultraviolet radiation through an optical window and controlled shutter
- Four flasks remain shielded as in-flight controls
This arrangement allows the team to identify biological changes caused specifically by radiation, rather than by other aspects of the flight environment. Before flight, the cells are stained with a fluorescent indicator. The indicator is excited by a specific wavelength of light, and the resulting fluorescence is measured by HELIA’s photonic system throughout the mission. This provides a non-destructive measurement of cell integrity.
Once the radiation response has been measured, the samples are remotely injected with an RNA-preserving fixative. This preserves their biological state for post-flight transcriptome analysis back at the University of Nottingham.
The exposed samples will then be compared with the protected in-flight samples, matched laboratory controls kept on the ground and environmental and radiation measurements recorded during flight.
HELIA’s first mission-ready laboratory, HELIA Mk1, will carry U-87 MG human glioblastoma cells. These brain-cancer cells provide an established research model and are sufficiently sensitive to help validate the performance of the HELIA platform.
Beyond its first flight, HELIA is intended to become an open-source, reusable platform for future biological research experiments on high-altitude balloons.
The HELIA team
The experiment is being developed by a multidisciplinary team of 15 students from the University of Nottingham.
The team includes students from Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Physics, Medicine, Pharmacy and Computer Science.
HELIA in a nutshell
| Experiment | HELIA (High-altitude Experiment Laboratory for Incubation and Analysis) |
| Objective | To isolate and measure the biological effects of stratospheric radiation on human cells under controlled environmental conditions |
| University - Country | University of Nottingham - England |
| Website | HELIA Website |
| Social media |
HELIA on Instagram HELIA on LinkedIn |