Purdue Researchers Unveil Mars Water History Through Meteorite Study

https://amzn.to/4dyFiAI

Transcript

00:00This meteorite has been at Purdue for years but now researchers have published

00:03a new paper about it. They've concluded the meteorite provides evidence when

00:07water was formed on Mars. Star City talked with assistant professor in

00:10Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department Marissa Tremblay. We've known

00:15actually for a long time that the meteorite interacted with water when it

00:19was still a rock on Mars before it came to Earth but figuring out when that

00:23interaction with water happened has been really challenging. Tremblay explains

00:27that the meteor was named after Lafayette because it was discovered in a

00:30drawer at Purdue. They originally thought it was actually like a glacially polished

00:34rock but it was sent to the Field Museum where they correctly identified it as a

00:38meteorite. Tremblay talks about the process for dating the minerals in the

00:41paper. It's called argon-argon geochronology and essentially we're

00:45using a mode of radioactive decay where potassium which is common in rock

00:53forming minerals will decay to argon which is a noble gas and is not very

00:57common in rocks and minerals. Senior research scientist Ryan Ichert has been

01:02a part of this project too. He talks about what he's been working on in his

01:05role in the research. The meteorite has been around for a while and many people

01:09have worked on it. There were a number of older data sets that people had used to

01:14to understand the age and history of the meteorite and there were some aspects of

01:19those data sets that were a little bit peculiar. Both Ichert and Tremblay find

01:23this experience to be exciting. There's lots of information from remote sensing,

01:26Martian rovers, from things like that but these are actual physical samples

01:30from another planet that we get to work on and it's so rare and so exciting that

01:34we get to do it. We don't have that many meteorites from Mars so that's pretty

01:36special. This research gives insight to Mars and could totally change what we

01:40think about the planet. Madison Diehl, Star City News, West Lafayette.