Schmidt, a geologist who studies igneous and volcanic rocks on both Earth and Mars, is one of a team of world-renowned scientists working on the Perseverance rover mission underway on Mars, searching the Jezero crater for signs of ancient life in the desert people. On Thursday, about 18 months after the rover crashed on Mars, Schmidt’s team led by Yang Liu at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published its first research paper on science.org, analyzing a massive rock formation on the planet’s surface . Schmitt said Brock’s postdoctoral associate, Tanya Kizovsky, helped with research for this paper, and two other graduate students will collaborate with her on future research she conducts. “They love it. They’re really excited about it,” he 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,” he said, adding that the visit also gave them a look at future projects under development, such as the Europa Clipper – a spacecraft built to search for life beneath the ice of one of Jupiter’s icy moons . “He got to meet a lot of people. To the students, they think of these people as heroes, but to me they are just my colleagues,” he said with a laugh. Schmidt’s research focused on the rover’s Planetary Instrument for Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), which uses an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine the composition of the Martian regolith. The research work focused on the origin of a 70,000 square kilometer rock formation that contains a large abundance of olivine, a mineral considered essential for 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 widespread area,” he said, adding that the formation stretches from the planet’s northern plains to Jezero Crater, which is north of Mars’ equator. “This large olivine-bearing unit is something we were able to identify from its orbit, and there have been many studies speculating about its origin,” he said, adding that some of those studies suggested it could be related to a meteorite impact. . Schmidt said the new study, however, showed that the formation is the result of slow cooling of magma, from volcanism or impact. “This study shows that this is an igneous rock—at least in the Jezero crater—that crystallized from the magma, and it’s really cool that we can 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 mission-related goals, such as learning more about the planet’s history. But to determine when the rock formations formed, he said, they would have to be returned to Earth. “We can use radiometric isotopes to determine when this rock crystallized or formed. But we don’t have that capability with the rovers right now or the landers to be able to tell how old a rock is,” Schmidt said. Although previous missions to Mars have estimated the age of rocks, he said those measurements are based on “a lot of assumptions” and that there are “huge errors in these measurements.” “If we can bring back a rock and we can date it accurately, it will be very important to understanding the history of the planet,” he 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 worked on that will be published in the near future. SHARE:
