Print button

Abstract EANA2024-100


SenseLife: remote detection of living organisms with full Stokes spectro-polarimetry

Brice-Olivier Demory (1), Lisa Brandenburg (1,2), Mathilda Fatton (1,2), Jonathan Grone (1), Empar Meyer (1,2), C. H. Lucas Patty (1), Danaé Bregnard (1,2), Urs Schroffenegger (1), Pilar Junier (2)
(1) Center for Space and Habitability (CSH), Faculty of Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland (2) Laboratory of Microbiology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland


SenseLife aims at harnessing the potential of full Stokes spectro-polarimetry to remotely detect living organisms in the outer Solar System by exploiting life’s distinctive homochirality. Life’s homochirality is one of the most reliable biomarkers, which has previously demonstrated its capability to unambiguously detect and characterise cyanobacteria, plants and anoxygenic phototrophs.

SenseLife is building new series of instruments with increased spectral coverage (380 to 900 nm) to capture signatures of a wider range of bacterial pigments. Building on an interdisciplinary team consisting of microbiologists, astrophysicists and engineers, SenseLife aims to reconcile lab measurements of bacterial samples with field observations. To this end, our team is focusing on a range of living organisms relevant for icy moons that are found in Earth ecosystems (e.g. glaciers, mountain lakes). These data will then be used to construct a model database of these benchmark biosignatures in circular polarisation, which will in turn be used to interpret the integrated, remote sensing data from space. We will present several results obtained with our FlyPol instrument in the frame of the project, mostly obtained from field campaigns.

SenseLife will establish the required thresholds for the remote detectability of living organisms on icy moons with spectro-polarimetry, which may be conducted as soon as the end of the decade with ground- or space-based facilities. Finally, we will also show how SenseLife is sparking off pioneering interdisciplinary collaborations that aim to tackle major societal challenges, such as new techniques for non-invasive, in-vivo diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Who thought that astrobiology and cancer research had nothing in common?