OAST
Oceans Across Space and Time (OAST)
Faculty Advisor/PI: Prof. Britney Schmidt (Cornell); Prof. Christopher E. Carr (Co-I)
Start Date: September, 2018
Current Status: Active
Collaborators: OAST has an extended multi-institute team.
Oceans Across Space and Time (OAST) project is part of the Network for Life Detection (NfoLD), funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Program. Our goal is to understand how ocean worlds and their biospheres co-evolve to produce detectable signals of a past or present living world, by combining the expertise of a multidisciplinary team. This work has involved studies of hypersaline lakes in interior British Columbia, a commercial salt works at South Bay Salt Works, San Diego, a set of Western Australia transient lakes, and (upcoming) a robotic mission to a Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basin (DHAB). Our lab’s part of the work involves microbial adaptation and evolution to hypersaline systems, focusing on life detection such as with biological and solid state nanopore.
Video: Sampling hypersaline lakes during winter in Interior British Columbia (YouTube)
For more information: https://oast.eas.gatech.edu/
Funding: Supported by awards 80NSSC18K1301 and 80NSSC22K1409 (PI: Britney Schmidt).