Biosciences at Boulby Underground Laboratory: a Deep Subsurface Analogue Test Environment for Planetary Exploration and Astrobiology

 

The Boulby Underground Laboratory (BUL) is the UK’s deep underground science facility located in north-east of England, 1.1 km below the surface in the ICL Boulby Mine, an active polyhalite mine.  

BUL was established in 1988 to search for dark matter, because with an overburden of 2805 meters water equivalent, the cosmic radiation is decreased a million-fold, making BUL one of a few underground laboratories around the world suitable for experiments requiring low background radiation conditions. In the beginning, BUL was purely focused on rare-event searches but has since branched out into multidisciplinary studies and the establishment of a biosciences programme.  

The current underground facility includes clean room laboratory space and an Outside Experimentation Area, as well as expansion plans for an underground laboratory five times the size of the current one. The Outside Experimentation Area is well-suited for astrobiology research and analogue space studies, as it is in a layer of 200-million-year-old salt, in a hot, dusty and, in a sense, extreme environment. The flagship of the bioscience programme is the Mine Analogue Research (MINAR) Programme which BUL has hosted since 2013 in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh UK Centre for Astrobiology. Arranged yearly, MINAR brings together international teams from NASA, ESA, and universities in the UK and abroad down to Boulby for a short duration to study life in the extreme and test planetary exploration technologies. 

We will give a summary of the Boulby underground laboratory and environment, and the past, present and future of our biosciences programme, with special attention to its role as an analogue site for space exploration. The Boulby lab is funded and operated by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) operating under the United Kingdom Research and Innovation.