Brock prof part of Mars mission
Mariek Schmidt excited to work with team of scientists from NASA
Mariek Schmidt’s thoughts will be a world away on Thursday.
The Brock University earth sciences professor will be watching with bated breath as NASA’S Perseverance rover touches down on Mars.
She’ll also be looking forward to working with a team of scientists, searching for signs of ancient life on the cold, desolate world about 55 million kilometres away from her St. Catharines home.
Schmidt is part of an international team of scientists participating in the Perseverance mission.
“We’re looking for evidence of past life. We’re looking for evidence of habitability — a geological site where life could have happened,” she said.
The rover’s landing site, Jezero Crater, might be one of those locations.
She said scientists believe the crater was flooded with lake water for millions of years, long enough that life could have formed there.
Carbonates found in the area around the crater might also indicate it is less acidic than other parts of the planet, increasing the likelihood of life.
“I expect it to be a lot of hard work, but really fascinating,” she said, adding she will also be teaching two courses at Brock while participating in the mission.
Schmidt said the team of scientists will guide the rover through the crater, collecting samples of rock and soil that will be cached until they can eventually be returned to Earth in future missions, likely by 2034.
“We’re trying to pinpoint
which samples would be the most likely to yield clues about life on Mars,” she said.
Schmidt said it’s unlikely the age-old questions about life on Mars will be answered until those samples are in the hands of Earthbound scientists and can be studied.
“Unless we were to find macro fossils — fossils you can see with your eye — but that would be really unlikely,” she said. “It’s more likely that life on Mars was microbial, things that lived in and around rocks.”
It’s the third time Schmidt has been part of a NASA rover mission. She was previously involved in the Mars Exploration mission from 2005 to 2009 that included two rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity. She was also part of the team studying the red planet using the Curiosity rover in 2012.
“The experience from previous missions is how discovery really drives it,” she said.
“Before we land, we do all of our homework. There’s so much work that goes into characterizing the sites from orbit. And once you’re on the ground, and you see the rocks up close, you tend to be surprised by what you find.”
Schmidt recalled the excitement she felt when she recognized a rock formation that Spirit photographed.
“I was able to see it,” she said. “Oh my god, we were looking at a tephra deposit — a type of deposit that forms from explosive volcanism. It was so exciting I couldn’t sleep, because that’s my expertise.”
It might seem like an unusual career path for a vulcanologist. Schmidt said she applied for a job working with data from the Spirit rover. “I was lucky enough to get it,” she said, adding the job allowed her “to bridge that gap between geology and petrology — the science of rocks and their chemistry.”
During past missions, Schmidt said, she stayed in California working with colleagues who scheduled their days by Mars time.
“We did that with the Curiosity mission. I was fortunate to be able to travel to California and live on Mars time for a few months,” she said, adding a day on Mars is about 30 minutes longer than Earth days.
But living on Mars time won’t be possible during the upcoming mission.
“It’s more challenging, because we’re all remote. Everybody on the science and engineering team is basically scattered across the globe,” Schmidt said.