https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/cae7d028-9f42-421f-905f-041ba7c81d65 Title: Orbit-AL: Tracking Satellite Metals from the Sky to the Lab Description: Most satellites in low Earth orbit re-enter the atmosphere within 4 to 5 years. During re-entry, spacecraft metals vaporize and can end up in tiny atmospheric particles. We are starting to know how much iron and aluminum is up there, but not how reactive it is, under what form or what environmental impact it has. Orbit-AL is our attempt to build a measurement chain for that question, end to end. We designed RoDS, a sampler deployed by weather balloon, that collects particles across five altitude bands from 0 to 30 km. Back in the lab, we extract the metals from the filters using two complementary protocols : one mild and aqueous (Mouton), one hot and acidic (Berger), and test the extracts with engineered E. coli: a Fur-regulated mCherry reporter for iron, and a de novo split-sfGFP design for aluminum, since no natural sensor for it exists. Where we got to: we attempted two launches, but weather conditions prevented RoDS from flying properly so we got delayed and have a planned next launch in November. The Mouton extraction recovered high quantity of spiked metals. The iron sensor gave a clear, concentration-dependent response. The aluminum sensor did not, we traced the problem to plasmid uptake and design issues that we are still working through. Along the way we talked with atmospheric chemists, engineers, historians and philosophers, and they kept widening the question: space is not only for specialists, and what we send up there is something we all have to care about. Orbit-AL is a prototype, not yet a validated measurement, but it is a first step toward following these metals from the sky to the lab. EPFL iGEM 2026, Orbit-AL team Wiki | Official Page Thu, 29 Oct 2026 22:23:41 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.igem.org https://video.igem.org/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/cae7d028-9f42-421f-905f-041ba7c81d65 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.igem.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.