For several Brock University students taught by Professor Mariek Schmidt, the opportunity to help with her research has literally sent them “over the moon.”
Schmidt, a geologist who studies igneous and volcanic rocks on both Earth and Mars, is part of a world-renowned team of scientists collaborating on the Perseverance rover mission underway on Mars, looking for in the Jezero crater signs of ancient life in the desolate world.
On Thursday, about 18 months after the rover landed on Mars, Schmidt’s team led by Yang Liu at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published its first research paper on the website science.org, analyzing a massive rock formation in the surface of the planet.
Schmidt said Brock’s postdoctoral fellow, Tanya Kizovski, helped with the research for this work, while two other master’s students will work with her on future research she is conducting.
“They love it. They are very excited about it,” he said.
Schmidt, an earth science professor at the university, said one of her students took her on a tour of the Jet Propulsion Lab in California last week, “and I was over the moon.”
“I was just taking pictures of everything,” he said, adding that the visit also gave them a look at future projects in development such as the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft being built to search for life beneath the ice of a of the frozen moons of Jupiter.
“He met a lot of people. To the students, they think of these people as some kind of heroes, but to me they’re just my colleagues,” he said with a laugh.
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 work focused on the origins of a 70,000 square kilometer rock formation that contains large abundances of olivine, a mineral considered essential in the development of life. Schmidt said microbes on Earth are known to eat olivine, which contains oxygen and iron.
“It’s huge. It’s this very widespread area,” he said, adding that the formation stretches from the planet’s northern lowlands to 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 have been many studies that have speculated about its origin,” he said, adding that some of those studies suggest that could be associated with a meteorite impact.
Schmidt said the new study, however, showed that the formation is the result of slow cooling of magma, volcanism or an impact.
“This study shows that it is an igneous rock, at least in Jezero Crater, that crystallized from magma and it’s great that we can say what the source 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, including learning more about the planet’s history.
But to determine when the rock formations formed, he said, it will be necessary to return to Earth.
“We can use radiometric isotopes to determine when that rock crystallized or formed. But we don’t have that ability with the rovers right now or with the landers to be able to figure out the age of a rock,” Schmidt said.
While previous Mars missions have estimated the age of the rocks, he said those measurements are based on “a lot of assumptions” and there are “huge errors in these measurements.”
“If we can recover a rock and can accurately date it, it will be very important to understanding the history of the planet,” he said.
The rover is collecting Martian rock core samples, including samples taken from the olivine-rich rock formation, which will be collected and returned to Earth during a future mission, likely in 2034.
Schmidt said the latest research paper is one of several he has been working on that will be published in the near future.
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