How does life that’s evolved on Earth react to being in the radiation-rich, gravity-poor environment of space? And how can we learn about these impacts before we send people to Mars or anywhere else in the universe?
Since 2018, the ‘Open Science for Life in Space’ Analysis Working Groups’ are made up of people - scientists, students, and the interested public - working together to answer these questions using data from past missions and space experiments. Relevant data of all sorts are being collected in the Open Science Data Repository. The nine Analysis Working Groups are informing metadata standards to maximize the data’s re-usability, and investigating those data to answer questions in basic science, applied science, and operational outcomes for space exploration and knowledge discovery. Dozens of project groups are active at any time.
Join us to learn about space biology, the impressive accomplishments and ambitious goals of these working groups, and a model of citizen science that centers not on a single research question, but on a scientific resource: the Open Science Data Repository.