STIA 4414: Mission Design Lab

This interdisciplinary course will take you through our shared history of exploring space, from learning what the surface of Mars looks like up close to detecting ice plumes on Saturn’s moons.

We will learn how we take measurements on remote celestial bodies, what we have found so far, and how those measurements have gradually reshaped what we think about the possibilities of “life” out there. We move mission by mission, from setting foot on our Moon to sending rovers to Mars to bringing back dust from an asteroid, asking what each mission can claim given its constraints. Then students will practice the central habit of astrobiology: following the ladder of evidence, where contamination control, repeatability, and context matter as much as the signal itself. We will examine why particular instruments are chosen, what each measurement can and cannot imply about habitability or life, and how mission design quietly encodes our assumptions about biology. Your training culminates in a collaborative project: a defended analysis of a proposal for your team’s own life-detection mission.