Prestigious ERC Starting Grant for Astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux
Astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux from the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity has been awarded the European Research Council's prestigious Starting Grant. For five years, he will be able to pursue a cutting-edge research project with 1.56 million euros.
Verseux's project investigates how cyanobacteria can be used to sustain long-term missions to Mars by providing the crew with a permanent supply of essential consumables. Even if we humans limit ourselves to the absolutely necessary, we still need some things to survive – oxygen and food, for example.
Whenever we go to remote places on Earth, we take sufficient supplies with us. In space, the astronauts on board the International Space Station ISS are regularly supplied with the help of cargo capsules. But if we want to travel to Mars, neither large supplies nor continuous resupply are possible. The transport route is too hazardous and the costs are too high. The solution, therefore, lies in producing essential consumer goods from raw materials available locally.
Dr. Cyprien Verseux has already demonstrated that some cyanobacteria are able to produce oxygen and biomass from the natural resources of Mars. He obtained initial research findings at the Laboratory of Applied Space Microbiology (LASM), which he heads at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen.
The big question now is: how can this be done efficiently? To answer this, a better understanding of how cyanobacteria metabolize Martian resources at the cellular and molecular level is needed. This will be investigated, among other things, by means of laboratory experiments using specifically developed apparatus that uses little more than the raw materials from the Martian soil and atmosphere. In addition to the laboratory work, mathematical models will be developed to predict the growth rates, productivity, and efficiency of the bacterial cultures.
The European Research Council Starting Grant opens up new opportunities for Cyprien Verseux and his research team, especially by creating two doctoral positions. “With our project 'MarCyano', we set to achieve two goals. One is to gain some fundamental knowledge on cyanobacterial responses to environments which are alien to them, such as atmospheric conditions that do not exist on Earth. Another is to develop solutions which can help make the exploration of Mars by humans sustainable,” explains the researcher.
However, Verseux and his team are not only concerned with sustainability concepts for long-term missions to Mars. They will also transfer their findings and developed systems into new approaches and technologies that serve a more sustainable use of naturally occurring but increasingly scarce resources on Earth.
Verseux is a member of the “Humans on Mars” initiative and is involved in the application for the “The Martian Mindset: A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm” excellence cluster at the University of Bremen. The interdisciplinary academic team benefits from his expertise, and their research could now help to secure excellence status for the University of Bremen once again.
About Cyprien Verseux:
Dr. Cyprien Verseux, a French biologist, has been conducting research at the University of Bremen's Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) since 2019. He set up the Laboratory of Applied Space Microbiology (LASM) there, and is head of a ZARM research group of the same name. Prior to that, he completed his doctorate with astrobiology as his area of focus at the University of Rome II in Italy and at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, USA.
He has first-hand experience of exploration missions in remote areas: in 2018, he headed the French-Italian Concordia research station in the Antarctic. He spent a year there, including the winter months when temperatures can drop as low as minus 80°C and darkness lasts for months. In 2015, he took part in NASA's HI-SEAS Mars simulation project and lived in isolation with five scientists for a year in a “Mars station” on the barren slopes of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, USA.
His academic achievements were honored in 2019 with a research fellowship from the renowned Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Youtube video about the LASM laboratory
Article in the University's up2date online magazine: https://www.up2date.uni-bremen.de/en/article/on-a-mars-mission-from-cyanobacteria-to-bioplastics
Contact:
Jasmin Plättner
ZARM Communication Team
Email: jasmin.plaettner(at)zarm.uni-bremen.de
Phone: +49 (0)421 218-57794
Dr. Cyprien Verseux
Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM), University of Bremen
Email: cyprien.verseux(at)zarm.uni-bremen.de
