The possibility that life could spread beyond Earth has fascinated humanity for a long time, and to date it is very topical due to recent plans to return to the Moon, and to conquer Mars.

COSMIC aims at creating the first self-sustainable microecosystem payload (biohybrid payload) fitting in 1 U (about 10X10X10 cm of dimensions, overall weight below 1.3 kg) of 3U CubeSat spacecraft orbiting in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The biohybrid payload will embed biotic components (e.g. algae, plants, microorganisms, micro-mesoinvertebrates), abiotic elements (e.g. water, substrate, light), and technology (e.g. miniature sensors, and low-power electronics) enabling long-term observations and interactions. Living organisms will be linked to physical components via nutrient cycles and energy flows in a closed controlled system usable for future missions in space. The platform will also include a monitor payload consisting of state-of-art particle detector sensitive to charge (electrons/protons/nuclei) and neutral (Gamma-rays) radiation, capable to provide fine event time-stamping and spectral information to assess particle background and tag transient events (solar flares, Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes). Our controlled long-operation system, with its reduced size and the pioneer organisms included, will provide an unprecedented yet reliable model in the design of future, more sustainable and optimized bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs), with important socio-economic impact due to the reduction of logistic costs, easy reproducibility, and scalability. COSMIC will also provide a unique tool to investigate differences of ecological processes in Earth and in Space, producing completely novel sources of data, unveiling new insights on climate-life interactions, and climate-technology interactions, useful to predict future climate change dynamics on Earth.