Xenobiology is a field of research in the study of the universe- lots of biology, speculative chemistry, and instrumentation design for detecting trace signatures and furious debate about whether observed signature imply life .. or something else.

Building a SKA radio telescope network has many challenges, not the least being increased noise from the LEO shell.

TBH there's a long long list of 'interesting' parts to the modern study of everything "out there", the greater question is what kinds of things do you find interesting?

Eg: Maggie Aderin found her way in via Engineering and then applied work on satellites and telescopes .. but is that really "astronomy" or just watchmaking for astronomers?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/3trm0Y2037DNmqMyjm...

Either way, there's still a tonne of research that goes into the gadget building side of things, this goes hand in hand with those that theorise about black holes eating out the centres of galaxies, the cosmic background, on so on.