Today for our Explorers Club series, we are about to be hit by a meteorite of space knowledge as we have a wildly accomplished scientist and researcher entering our atmosphere, Dr. Nina Lanza. She is the Team Lead for Space and Planetary Exploration in Space and Remote Sensing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is also the Principle Investigator of the ChemCam instrument on the Mars Curiosity Rover (sadly not sponsored by us) and a team member for the SuperCam instrument on the Mars Perseverance rover. She’s an expert on Mars and does a lot of research on meteorites and minerals that can tell us about the interactions between rocks, soil, atmosphere, and water on the planet.
Today for our Explorers Club series, we are about to be hit by a meteorite of space knowledge as we have a wildly accomplished scientist and researcher entering our atmosphere, Dr. Nina Lanza. She is the Team Lead for Space and Planetary Exploration in Space and Remote Sensing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is also the Principle Investigator of the ChemCam instrument on the Mars Curiosity Rover (sadly not sponsored by us) and a team member for the SuperCam instrument on the Mars Perseverance rover. She’s an expert on Mars and does a lot of research on meteorites and minerals that can tell us about the interactions between rocks, soil, atmosphere, and water on the planet.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/explorers-club-nina-lanza
CALLI: Hey Nate, have you ever held a meteorite?
NATE: I’ve been able to hold pieces of one! In fact I made a knife out of a piece of meteorite.
CALLI: Well, today we have an incredible guest whose research explores how meteorites give us a wealth of information about space, and particularly for our guest, about Mars.
NATE: But not all meteorites are from Mars, right? So how does that work? How do you even find them? I have so many questions.
CALLI: How about I let our guest explain.
NINA: The reason that meteorites are so important is because it's like we get to sample the solar system without leaving home. We're just sitting here and all these different pieces of different worlds are just landing here, waiting for us to pick them up. So it's like the world's cheapest planetary science mission, right? I was lucky enough to spend a season in Antarctica as part of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites Project or transmit. And this is a project that was going for I think it's something like 44 years. It's actually slightly older than I am and people have gone to the Antarctic to recover meteorites and that's the source of 60% of the known world. Meteorites, like in the entire world, has come from this one project, which is an incredible track record.
NATE: That’s insane! Who is this meteorite master? And why Antarctica? The questions never end.
CALLI: Well, let’s get into it then, shall we?
[SFX: MUSIC IN/WOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back! Today for our Explorers Club series, we are about to be hit by a meteorite of space knowledge as we have a wildly accomplished scientist and researcher entering our atmosphere, Dr. Nina Lanza.
CALLI: Dr. Lanza is the Team Lead for Space and Planetary Exploration in Space and Remote Sensing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is also the Principle Investigator of the ChemCam instrument on the Mars Curiosity Rover (sadly not sponsored by us) and a team member for the SuperCam instrument on the Mars Perseverance rover. Needless to say, she’s an expert on Mars and, as she mentioned, she does a lot of research on meteorites and minerals that can tell us about the interactions between rocks, soil, atmosphere, and water on the planet.
NATE: And maybe life?
CALLI: And maybe life! She specializes in a mineral called manganese, which actually can give us information about potential microbes on Mars.
NATE: How does that work?
CALLI: Well, I had to do some research but from what I understand manganese is a periodic element that has way more uses than what we can cover today but basically all you need to know is that it’s incredibly important and necessary to sustain human life. It’s in our bones, our kidneys, our liver and our brains! It’s an essential element for forming our bones and keeping our bodies functioning like they should. It’s also, in Dr. Lanza’s case, an excellent clue to Mars’ environment, history and ability to sustain life.
NINA: Well, you know, manganese, I think, is an undervalued element in many ways. You know, one of the things that's so interesting about manganese minerals is that we didn't expect them to be on Mars. So when we found manganese on Mars and these high concentrations, we were like, how did this happen? How in the world did that happen? And so it's hard to piece that together with our current instrument payloads, with our wonderful rovers and orbiters. So I think we're not going to be able to find the definitive answer to that. What is the origin of these minerals on Mars until after we do sample return, which luckily enough, we are doing with the Perseverance Rover? That's the first step. So we're taking samples of rocks and we're going to just cache them up, put them in these little containers, and then send another spacecraft to go get them. And so it should be in the 2030, which feels very far in some ways, but that's that's actually pretty soon. So only then, I think will we be able to do the studies with our terrestrial laboratories to really definitively say whether or not, you know, microbes made this manganese.
NATE: Wow, that’s incredible! So, she specializes in research here on Earth to tell us about what’s going on on Mars.
CALLI: Exactly! She does a lot of work in the Canadian Arctic to do comparative studies to the environment on Mars.
NINA: So we are doing a project that we have given the acronym of GRAPE, which is the Gamma Rotorcraft for analog planetary environments. You know, you have to have an acronym or it's not a mission. So yeah, so Grape, our goal with Grape is to take new instrumentation to a Mars analog location. And so Mars today is a very cold environment. And if there is any water in those soils, then it's going to be frozen. And so the Canadian Arctic has a lot of peri-glacial and permafrost environments which are perfect for Mars analogs.
CALLI: There’s a very specific crater that Dr. Lanza is researching that has similar characteristics to the landscape on Mars.
NINA: We're going to Devon Island and we're going specifically to Houghton Crater, which is a big impact crater that's actually very well-preserved. It's a great Mars analog because it's impacting into frozen ground. So that's exactly what you would expect on Mars, right. But what makes an island even better is that there is an impact crater there preserved in the sedimentary rocks. So all over earth, you know, there have been a ton of impacts, but a lot of times those impacts are erased because we have a very active water cycle. Right. But so up in the Arctic, you know, we're lucky enough to have this perfect crater that is like frozen in time in this Mars analog environment. So it's a great place to test out new techniques for measurements that you might want to take on Mars in the future.
NATE: And the work her team is doing there is basically pretending that they are on Mars? How does that work?
NINA: So the work that we're doing on Devon Island is actually testing instrument techniques. So what we're going to do is bring a type of spectroscopy instrument so it's a neutron and gamma spectroscopy instrument. So you might imagine there's neutrons and gamma rays that we're using.
CALLI: And for the folks at home, neutrons are of course one of the building blocks of atoms. Gamma rays are a type of electromagnetic wave that we can measure. They form the electromagnetic spectrum with radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, visible light, which is the only type of wave we can see, X-rays and gamma rays. Each type of wave carries energy and through the type of energy we can measure we can learn about things we cannot see. So the gamma ray spectrometer Nina uses allows her to track and count photons and neutrons to learn about the atomic structure of Mars.
NINA: And this is a chemistry technique. It's actually been applied to planetary surfaces before. You know, it's used on Earth. It's used on Mars right now. It's going to fly to other planets. So it's not new per se. But the way we're going to use it is brand new. We're trying to develop autonomous systems that can take humans out of the loop so that we don't have to tell our machines exactly what to do. Because a lot of times the planetary surfaces we're interested in are really far away and communication takes a long time. So the more that your instruments can do on their own, the better that just increases the science returns. So you don't want your, you know, billion dollar instrument just sitting there doing nothing while you're waiting for the signal.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATE: It’s so interesting that she specializes in researching the environment on Mars but it sounds like the information spans across a bunch of different disciplines. So far we have manganese, instrument testing and mineral samples in the Haughton Crater… she’s like the ultimate super-scientist.
CALLI: Yes and she’s the ultimate explorer! Going back to our initial conversation about her research on meteors in the Antarctic, she is a field team member for the Antarctic search for meteorites and she has found such good info on dead planets based on what she found.
NINA: The composition of the earth really changes based on where you are, just because gravity has essentially pulled heavy things to the center. That's true for other planetary bodies as well. And so you can tell when you get a meteorite from one of these bodies, because sometimes you get pieces of deep within a planet that no longer exists because it was blown up. And now you're holding a piece of its core in your hand, which is amazing. You're like, That was really sad. But now that core of an ancient planet is sitting here in Antarctica and I'm going to collect it. It's a really incredible. So, you know, people when they think of meteorites, they're thinking of these iron metal ones which are actually not that common. They are they represent the core of a differentiated body that no longer exists. So I think they're really special for that reason. But of course, you know, these planets also have rocky parts to them, which are incredibly important to study as well. So we found when I was there, we found two metallic meteorites and then like I want to say five differentiated meteorites. I remember this. I found a piece of the asteroid Vesta and I was so excited because they're very distinctive.
NATE: And that relates to her research on Mars?
CALLI: Absolutely.
NINA: It was my dream to find a piece of Mars and in fact, pieces of Mars have been found in Antarctica. All of our Martian meteorites, or I should say all many of our Martian meteorites have been recovered in Antarctica. And in fact, before we even knew that Martian meteorites could get to us, you know, prior to the eighties, the orbital dynamics were like nothing could come off of another planet and land here. That doesn't happen. Well, then in the eighties. The Asmat project recovered a rock that was a perfect match for lunar rocks. Now, the reason we knew about lunar rocks and what they were made of, we had done Apollo, we had brought samples back and we were like, How do you explain this? If pieces of the moon can't get here, how is this piece of the moon sitting in Antarctica like? And so they had to figure it out. And then people rushed to reevaluate their meteorite collections. And then I think it was 1990 or 1991, the very first paper was published. It said, This meteorite that we recovered many, many years ago has been identified as a martian rock, and that started a whole new field of study. So right now, I think we have about 150 known Martian rocks. And of course, now we know a lot more about Mars from all these surface missions. So it's a lot easier for us to make that case. Of course, it's going to be really exciting to get those samples back from perseverance and then make that direct comparison.
CALLI: As she mentions, Dr. Lanza is also in cahoots with both of the Mars Rovers: Perseverance and Curiosity.
NATE: Is there a big difference between those two?
NINA: They're both Mars rovers. So Curiosity and perseverance are twins. But Curiosity has been on the surface for ten years and perseverance has been on the year for one year.
CALLI: I was pretty fascinated by her work with the rovers and something that not a lot of people realize is that Curiosity and Perseverance are fitted with microphones. I was super interested in that because, famously, there is no sound in space, right? Sound needs air to travel so I had to ask her about that and whether or not she’s heard anything alien out there.
NINA: Why would we put a microphone on there? And I say, it's not just to hear what the Martians have been saying about us this whole time. Okay, that too. But it turns out that sound propagates differently in different types of atmospheres. So, you know what sound is, is a vibration. You know, I'm speaking to you vibrating the air, it's reaching your microphones, your ears, and you're interpreting that as sound. So that's all the way that the sound sounds is contingent upon the composition of an atmosphere, how dense it is and what it's made out of. All of those things are different on Earth and Mars. So trying to get a handle of how sound propagates on Mars is actually a really big deal. So that's a fundamental question. But the real reason I love having a microphone on there is because I want to listen to the sound of our laser instrument as it zaps rocks. Because it turns out if you listen to that sound, you can see changes as you drill deeply into that rock. It's not just right on the surface and you can hear if there is a rock coating on that rock or not. I've done experiments in the laboratory to demonstrate that this works. Yeah. So. So that's the reason we have a microphone on the Supercam instrument, which is the one that I work on, is to listen to that zap. But of course you can just turn on the microphone and just listen to Mars. And actually, Mars sounds just like a desert environment. If you were the only person there. It's just like the wind is so familiar in so many ways. It's incredible to hear, though, because it's familiar, but you know that it's coming from an alien world that people have never been to. So Mars has this incredible pull, right? Because it's so familiar and so alien at the same time is amazing.
NATE: The scope of her research is wild!
CALLI: So true. And it’s through the Explorer’s Club Discovery Expedition Grant that she’s able to do a lot of the incredible work that she’s been a part of.
NINA: The Explorers Club Discovery Expedition Grant is an incredible opportunity for my team to be able to do field measurements that we really otherwise wouldn't be able to do. I mean, quite simply, it's really expensive to go to the places that we need to go. It's just really hard to do that. And, you know, but it's also critical doing analog studies here on Earth is how we're going to be able to interpret data from the future, from other planets. So we really have to do this. This isn't something that we can model. We really have to go there and take the data to understand. So this grant is amazing because it's allowing us to actually get these data. You know, this is kind of a funny anecdote, but we tried to build Mars in our laboratory. We bought a bunch of Mars analog soil and we buried ice cubes in it. And we're like, Let's take some data. And it looks stupid. It's obviously not the same as doing it outside. Okay, we tried and so I that really shows me like how important it will be to take data in a realistic environment, in a true analog environment. So this grant is amazing for us.
CALLI: Dr. Lanza also had some great advice for those of us looking to follow in her explorer, genius, talented footsteps.
NINA: Well, if I only had one piece of advice, I would just say, you know, don't count yourself out. You know, sometimes it's very hard to imagine how you get from being who you are today to some incredible explorer tomorrow. You know, sometimes that path is not clear, but that shouldn't stop you from taking the steps to trying to be that. You know, my personal path went all over the place. I was obsessed with space as a kid, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to do space work. I really had no idea. I feel like if I could go back in time and tell my, you know, seven year old self, I don't know if my seven year old self would believe me. She'd be like, I don't know who you are, weirdo. But that's not true, you know? But so I think just, you know, believing that it's possible, even if you don't see how you get there, just keep putting one foot in front of the other and don't count yourself out. You don't know what you're capable of until you try.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATE: Wise words. A huge thank you to Dr. Nina Lanza for joining us today. I know I learned a ton of great info about how exploration on Earth allows us to learn more and more about eventually getting a person on Mars.
CALLI: And how to be a badass.
NATE: Of course. We will be back next week with some new episodes of Curiosity and another great conversation with an influential explorer from the Explorer’s Club.
GEORGE: The weightless experience, which we had about 3 minutes, was just amazing to be able to float around and do somersaults and all the rest. It was fun. It was exciting. But the high point of the flight for me, without a doubt, was The View. They have six people on board and every seat is a window seat. Great big window right next to your seat. And after we had blasted off to be able to look down and see the curvature of the earth and that Thin Blue band, that is the atmosphere. And then above it is the Black Sky, and it's the blackest black that you could ever imagine. It was just, frankly, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Really, I get goosebumps and choke up a little bit just thinking about it. Just an incredible opportunity to see the planet below.
CALLI: Until next time, stay curious!