Kennedy Space Centre (KSC), Cape Canaveral, Florida 21st April 2025.
On Monday, April 21 at 4:15 a.m. ET, the BIOFILMS experiment was uploaded for the fourth time to the International Space Station by the Space-X Dragon 32nd Commercial Resupply Services mission (CRS-32). Once on the ISS, the bioreactors (hosting the biological samples) developed by Kayser Italia, will be installed by the crew in the KUBIK incubator available on board the station allowing automatic execution of the experiment scientific protocol.
The aim of the BIOFILMS experiment, developed under ESA contract and conceived by a scientific team affiliated with the German Space Agency DLR, is to investigate the antimicrobial properties of some metals (Copper/Steel/Brass) in a microgravity environment. The data generated by the mission on board the International Space Station will be used to properly select materials with antimicrobial properties to be used to support the activities of astronauts during space exploration missions. Different microbial species will be tested using different metal surfaces that will be cross-compared once the samples will be back on Earth. The biofilms will be growing on board of the ISS at three different g-levels: 1g (for reference), zero-g and Martian-g.
In the picture : the 24 Experiment Containers composing the BIOFILMS#4 experiment ready to fly