Interdisciplinary fieldwork activities for astrobiological studies in Italy

Field research, or fieldwork, represents an important step in the understanding of the processes observed through remote observations of our Solar System. In planetary sciences and astrobiology, studies on analog sites on Earth are of primary importance in understanding the factors influencing the presence and evolution of life, especially in extreme environments, where a large number of factors concur to the creation of very high-fidelity analog sites. However, the high geologic diversity of the Italian territory still offers several opportunities to study fossil and modern biosignatures in their environment. This work discusses the development of astrobiological field-studies gathering experienced Italian field-geoscientists from different disciplines into an interdisciplinary teamwork. This will require building teamwork among different different disciplines, building a common language to approach a common scientific problem. Efforts in this sense will offer the opportunity for the national astrobiological community to develop new studies where different experiments and data collection techniques are employed within the same study. These interdisciplinary studies represent the ideal environment to test combination of experiments or instrument prototypes for the design of payloads for future robotic or human interplanetary explorations.