Will the Curiosity Rover Support NAU Professor’s Research?
Curiosity, NASA’s latest space rover to land on Mars, is on a
mission to discover if carbon, water, and other life forms ever existed on the
“Red Planet.” Professor Nadine Barlow,
who is one of the world’s leading Mars scholars as well as the Associate
Department Chair for Physics and Astronomy at Northern Arizona University (NAU),
says that Curiosity’s findings could lead to other important
discoveries in space.
“If we find that there’s more than one place in our solar system where life
exists, or has existed, it would bode well for life forms elsewhere in the
universe,” says Barlow, who is also the director of NAU’S NASA Space Grant
Program. “It is searching for mineral evidence that could be indicative of past
life. If such evidence is found, it would indicate that the conditions
supporting life are pretty common throughout the universe and that we very
likely are not the only life forms around.”
Barlow is well established as an
expert on the red planet. She wrote an introductory text for graduate students–Mars, an Introduction to its Interior, Surface, and
Atmosphere–and her research focuses on impact craters and what they
tell us about the subsurface structure of the planet. As a graduate student,
she was one of the first astronomers to hypothesize that Mars once encompassed
a very water-rich environment, and possibly life itself.
“I started looking at the actual
appearances of craters on Mars and what they can tell us,” Barlow says. “They
have very different appearances, and that was probably tied in to subsurface
ice, maybe liquid water, and so forth. By measuring their diameter, you can
actually estimate how deep down they’re going and how deep down reservoirs
might actually be.”
Now, Barlow theorizes that Curiosity
will help provide first-hand evidence that supports her research, and will help
her better identify the features indicative of subsurface water within impact
craters across Mars and in similar environments around the solar system.
“I definitely will be incorporating the new results from Curiosity into my classes, as I have done in the past with results from other missions,” Barlow says. “My students see how rapidly our knowledge about astronomy and planetary science can change based on new discoveries from these types of missions. Every new mission and its associated discoveries lead to new avenues of research, in which many students will have the opportunity to participate.”