Five projects to share €600,000 in new round of PROSSE
Five research projects tied to space exploration, from building a drop tower to sustainable food production, will be funded by the Portuguese Space Agency under PROSSE, which drew 16 applications this year.
Producing oxygen from carbon dioxide on Mars, culturing fish cells in microgravity, and measuring the risk of thrombosis and stress from a fingertip. These are three of the five projects that RPROSSE (PROdex for Science in Space Exploration), the Portuguese Space Agency’s scientific research programme, will support in 2026, with €600,000 in total funding.
The projects were chosen from 16 applications, 14 of them deemed eligible and submitted by 12 institutions. Two will receive €150,000 each, the remaining three €100,000 each. Alongside the CO2 conversion of ARES, led by the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear (IPFN) at Instituto Superior Técnico, the cell culturing of Ocean2Orbit, from the Centre of Molecular and Environmental Biology (CBMA) at the University of Minho, and the microfluidic system of FingertipSPACE, from the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), come two further projects.
MARSEP, run by researchers at LIP Lisboa, will characterise the high-energy solar particles reaching Mars, combining data from the JUICE and BepiColombo missions with machine-learning reconstructions from Martian orbiters, to support space weather science and the assessment of radiation risks on future crewed missions. TOWER, from the Instituto de Telecomunicações and the Institute for Systems and Robotics, both linked to Técnico in Lisbon, will convert the stairwell of a building on the Alameda campus into a drop tower delivering around 2.5 seconds of microgravity, in a project designed to serve experiments across a range of scientific fields.
“Interest from the scientific community has not stopped growing. This year we received five more applications than in 2025 and went from two to five supported projects. This leap reflects the growth of the programme and the response of an ever-broader scientific ecosystem, one capable of taking space exploration from the study of radiation on Mars to sustainable food production,” says Joan Alabart, manager of the Space Exploration, Entrepreneurship and Innovation programmes at the Portuguese Space Agency.
“MARSEP, led by LIP, will work with data from missions such as JUICE and BepiColombo, drawing on Portugal’s national investment in scientific missions of this kind. The next stage is carried out with the technical support of ESA’s specialists, decisive in taking each project from proposal to reality,” adds Marta Gonçalves, manager of the Science programmes at the Portuguese Space Agency.
PROSSE grew out of Portugal’s participation in the European Space Agency’s PRODEX programme (the French acronym for PROgramme de Développement d’EXpériences scientifiques) and funds research on platforms ranging from ground-based and suborbital environments to microgravity and orbital missions.
The competition results can be consulted on the Portuguese Space Agency website.
