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Fabian Klenner

Fabian Klenner is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the University of Washington (UW). His research focus lies on the exploration of icy moons in the Solar System, in particular Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa. He is interested in geochemical processes happening on these moons as well as the detection of potential life beyond Earth.

Fabian is an affiliate of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and involved in the planning and design of a potential future Enceladus mission. He is Co-Investigator of BioSigN, an ESA-led experiment to be performed on the International Space Station. Fabian’s work is also relevant to the past Cassini mission and he is involved in ESA’s CALICO, a potential mission to dwarf planet Ceres. He is member of various learned societies, including his co-leadership of the Ocean Worlds and Icy Moons working group of the German Astrobiology Society.

Before accepting his current position at UW in 2023, he was a Postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, the same university from where he received his Ph.D. in 2021. He studied Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University (M.Sc. and B.Sc.).

An image of Enceladus assembled using infrared, green, ultraviolet, and clear filtered images taken by Cassini on July 14, 2005

Saturn’s Ocean Moon Enceladus Is Able to Support Life

This research team is working out how to detect extraterrestrial cells in the liquid water ocean hidden beneath Enceladus’s icy crust.