Science Operations (SOPS)

The SAGE mission has two primary objectives, the first of which is to conduct a biological ex- periment onboard the payload subsystem. The goal of this experiment is to sustain a secondary human cell line in orbit under controlled conditions, as well as to perform a protein expression experiment using fluorescence microscopy. The experiment will be monitored using a microscope onboard the payload platform, whereby the resulting images will be downlinked over the S-band antenna to the MOC via the Zurich ground station.

In detail, the Payload team aims to investigate cellular senescence in a human cell line. For this purpose a secondary human cell line will be used: HBL-1 (Human AIDS-related non-Hodgkin lymphoma). The advantage of this cell line lies in its growth properties, being a suspension cell line (thus not needing previous seeding and easier manipulation using microfluidics) and having a relatively short population doubling time (in ideal conditions roughly 19 hours). In total there will be six different experimental conditions: each condition having one well containing HBL1-GFP cells and one well containing HBL1-miRNAGFP (miRNA-146a-GFP). Here miRNA-146a-GFP will be used as a marker for senescence.

Changelog

Date	Revision	Change
2025/02/21	01	Initial commit.