Junior Professor Chair in Astrobiology at Aix-Marseille University

The project focuses on understanding the emergence of life in the Solar System through the characterization of Jupiter's moons and their environments, as well as preparing for the space exploration of Uranus and Neptune, still little explored but belonging to a class of planets ubiquitous in our Galaxy...

Gregoire Danger presented the Institut Origines prize to Maryse Napoleoni at the EJC - Exobiologie Jeunes Chercheurs 2022.

Her lecture focused on analogous experiments for the detection of bacterial biosignatures in ice grains of ocean worlds.

"We used the Laser Induced Liquid Beam Ion Desorption (LILBID) technique, which enables us to reproduce in the laboratory the mass spectra acquired during space missions by instruments such as the SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA) aboard Europa Clipper (NASA). We have simulated mass spectra derived from the analysis of ice grains containing bacteria cells, in order to characterize the biosignatures detectable by mass spectrometry if such life forms exist in the oceans of Europa or Enceladus".