Co-leveraging Scientific Advances in Space Biology and Astrobiology Towards Achieving NASA’s Life Science Objectives
Executive Summary: Distinct lines of scientific inquiry drives the separation of NASA’s fundamental life science research into Space Biology and Astrobiology. This division developed as a way to place life scientists alongside experts in the physical constraints that define the acclimation, adaptation and evolution of biology systems relevant to their respective subjects. For astrobiology, integration with disciplines such as geology, geochemistry, astronomy, planetary science, etc., enables a comprehensive assessment of the physical environment and its co-evolution with biological processes. Space Biology’s co-location with Physical Sciences places life science researchers adjacent to experts in the physical phenomena associated with microgravity and spaceflight, enabling an understanding of how the spaceflight environment affects biological systems. Despite this separation, aspects of both disciplines have converged on a similar, fundamental objective: to describe and understand the dynamics of complex living communities in the contexts of their physical environments. While the environmental systems and timescales are dramatically different, continuing to motivate the separation into distinct fields, similarities in the underlying objective present opportunities to find efficiencies, reduce overlap, and minimize duplication of effort. Space Biology and Astrobiology share a common need to understand microbial physiology in extreme environments – whether the ‘built’ spaceflight environment or the natural environments in which many astrobiology studies are conducted. In particular, open questions in each discipline require the development of quantitative frameworks, applicable at the ecosystem level, that support predictive capabilities for environments where observations are sparse. Additionally, both disciplines have a need to prepare, detect, and analyze the (potential) biological signal in complex samples-often in a completely autonomous fashion. The next decade will see NASA Space Biology moving to understand and describe the effects of the beyond low-earth orbit (BLEO) spaceflight environment on living systems. This new direction will dramatically reduce the opportunities for ground-based analysis of space-flown samples, driving space biology investigations towards fully autonomous experiments and missions. At the same time, astrobiology life detection missions aimed at detecting biosignatures on Mars and icy moons in the outer solar system could benefit from fully automated sample processing and analysis. There are opportunities to leverage instrument and method development between both disciplines within the context of these BLEO missions.