For a few Brock University students taught by professor Mariek Schmidt, an opportunity to assist in her research has literally sent them “over the moon.”
Schmidt, a geologist who studies igneous and volcanic rocks on both Earth and Mars, is one of a team of world-renowned scientists collaborating on the Perseverance rover mission underway on Mars, searching the Jezero crater for signs of ancient life on the desolate world.
Thursday, about 18 months after the rover touched down on Mars, Schmidt’s team led by Yang Liu at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published its first research paper on the science.org website, analysing a massive rock formation on the planet’s surface.
Schmidt said Brock post-doctoral fellow Tanya Kizovski assisted with the research for that paper, while two other master’s students will be working with her on future research she’s conducting.
“They love it. They’re really enthusiastic about it,” she said.
Schmidt, an earth sciences professor at the university, said one of her students accompanied her on a visit to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California last week, “and he was over the moon.”
“He was just taking pictures of everything,” she said, adding the visit also gave them a look at future projects under development such as the Europa Clipper — a spacecraft being built to search for life under the ice of one of Jupiter’s frozen moons.
“He got to meet a lot of people. For students, they think of these people as sort of heroes, but for me they’re just my colleagues,” she said, laughing.
Schmidt’s research focused on the rover’s Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), which uses an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine the composition of Martian regolith.
The research paper focused on the origins of a 70,000 square kilometre rock formation that contains high abundances of olivine, a mineral considered essential in the development of life. Schmidt said microbes on Earth have been known to eat olivine, which contains oxygen and iron.
“It’s huge. Its this wide-spread area,” she said, adding the formation extends from the planet’s norther lowlands through to the Jezero crater, located north of the Martian equator.
“This large olivine-bearing unit is something we’ve been able to identify from orbit and there has been a lot of studies that have been speculating about its origin,” she said, adding some of those studies suggested it could be associated with a meteor impact.
Schmidt said the new study, however, showed the formation is the result of slowly cooling magma, from volcanism or an impact.
“This study shows it’s an igneous rock — at least in the Jezero crater — that crystallized from magma and that’s really cool that we’re able to say what the origin is in this particular area.”
While the search for ancient life is a priority for the Perseverance rover, Schmidt said there are other goals associated with the mission such as learning more about the planet’s history.
But to determine when rock formations were formed, she said they will need to be returned to Earth.
“We can use radiometric isotopes to determine when that rock crystallized or formed. But we don’t have that ability with rovers right now or with landers to be able to find out how old a rock is,” Schmidt said.
Although previous Mars missions have estimated the age of rocks, she said those measurements are based on “a whole lot of assumptions” and there are “huge errors on those measurements.”
“If we can bring back a rock and can precisely date it, it’s going to be really important for understanding the history of the planet,” she said.
The rover is collecting core samples of Martian rocks — including samples taken from the olivine-rich rock formation — that will be collected and returned to Earth during a future mission, likely by 2034.
Schmidt said the latest research paper is one of several she has been working on that are being published in the near future.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMigwFodHRwczovL3d3dy5zdGNhdGhhcmluZXNzdGFuZGFyZC5jYS9uZXdzL25pYWdhcmEtcmVnaW9uLzIwMjIvMDgvMjYvYnJvY2stc2NpZW50aXN0LWFuZC1zdHVkZW50LWNvbnRyaWJ1dGUtdG8tbmV3LW1hcnMtcmVzZWFyY2guaHRtbNIBAA?oc=5
2022-08-26 19:54:57Z
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