Atakan Tepecik

I work as a scientific researcher at FH Aachen with a background in engineering and lab instrumentation, working as a group leader for AstroBioLab in the TRIPLE project. AstroBioLab is a multimodal robust surface field instrument to detect biosignatures in subglacial water - a test platform for the kind of access mission that icy moons like Europa and Enceladus will eventually require. My work spans from mechanical design, wet-lab work, data analysis to polar field deployment.

Life-detection instrumentation

The AstroBioLab is a compact laboratory built to look for signs of life in water. Within the TRIPLE project I am responsible for its design, integration and scientific operation - deciding which measurements are worth carrying when mass, power and volume are all severely constrained. The difficult part is rarely detecting a signal. It is establishing that what you detected came from the environment and not from the instrument that went in with it.

Habitability of ocean worlds

Beneath the ice shells of Europa and Enceladus there is liquid water, and with it, chemistry that could support life. Our work on habitability assessment asks what a mission would have to measure to make that judgement, and what conclusions those measurements would support. This is where instrumentation meets science: requirements written at the beginning of the project determine which questions are still answerable after years, when the probe is already under the ice.

Field deployment and planetary protection

Antarctica’s subglacial lakes are the closest analogues we have to an ice-covered ocean, which makes polar fieldwork the only serious test of this hardware. Preparing a deployment to Antarctica means solving problems that never appear in a lab: cold, logistics, power, no second attempt. It also means treating contamination as a design constraint - the cleanliness standards that protect a subglacial lake from us are the same ones that will protect Enceladus.