Brock geochemist casts her eyes to Mars
The rover vehicle Curiosity.
It’s among our most profound questions.
Is there or has there been other life beyond earth?
“Are we alone? You think of those sorts of things. But we also want to know if life is even possible there,” said Mariek Schmidt, a Brock University geochemist who has joined a team directing the space rover vehicle Curiosity to seek evidence of life on Mars.
“These are really fundamental questions that guide us. They’re why we keep going back to Mars.”
Schmidt and about 200 international scientists and engineers are in Pasadena, Calif. helping Curiosity navigate Martian terrain in a quest for clues of past life. It’s scheduled to touch down early Monday.
Schmidt’s mission is funded by the Canadian Space Agency, and she’s among a number of Canadians contributing to the rover team.
She’ll be working with an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, contributed by the Canadian Space Agency and built by a Canadian robotics firm. That complex device helps determine the composition of rocks.
Her own science work examines rocks and sediment and looks at how they were formed. She’ll look at whether potentially life-bearing liquids might have altered them over time.
The team will also direct where the mobile robotic laboratory goes inside a massive Gale Crater on six-kilometre high Mount Sharp. Layers in that peak could provide evidence of previous life.
Schmidt said the $2.5-billion Mars mission will likely last at least two years — the minimum length of time the rover could operate and be considered a success. The primary mission is to last 98 weeks, or one Martian year.
Her funded involvement through the Canadian Space Agency is for four years.
Born and raised in New Hampshire, Schmidt started at Brock in 2005 as a post doctoral fellow. She has been an assistant professor in its earth sciences department since 2010.
She said her yen for Mars exploration came somewhat unexpectedly.
“When I got my PhD, I didn’t know I’d even be going down this route,” she said with a chuckle.
A post-doctoral opportunity at the Smithsonian Institution to work on the Mars Spirit mission “sort of changed my trajectory,” she said.
As for her current mission, Schmidt said there’s even more at stake than life on Mars.
“The goal is also to be able to send people there,” she said. “Not only are we looking for the possibility life once existed, but also (could) humans if we were to go there, be able to even survive?”
To that end, radiation levels and the presence of heavy elements that could be poisonous will also be measured.
As the mission progresses, she is taking leave from teaching at Brock in the fall to work full-time on it. In mid-November, when back at Brock, she’ll connect with the Curiosity team and call in commands from her office.
Schmidt hopes to get students involved in that work.
“It is really wonderful Brock is supporting me like this,” Schmidt said.
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Space enthusiasts will be able to watch what NASA calls "seven minutes of terror" tonight when the space agency broadcasts live the Mars landing of its rover Curiosity.
Curiosity, which was launched in November, is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in an intricate manoeuvre involving split-second timing and hundreds of precise functions as it slows down from about 13,200 mph (21,240 km/h) to about 1.7 mph (2.7 km/h). The final tense moments have been dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" by scientists.
The landing is expected to take about four and a half hours: The broadcast starts at 11:30 p.m. ET tonight and runs until 4 a.m. ET Monday. The exact touch-down time is scheduled for 1:31 a.m.
If the mission is successful, viewers will be able to see Mission Control receive its first signal from the rover on Mars.
The broadcast will be streamed on NASA TV, on the agency's website, nasa.gov. It will also be shown on a giant screen in New York's Times Square as well as at other locations in the U.S.
William Shatner and Wil Wheaton narrate videos that explain the mission, which can also be found on NASA's website.