Kristen O’Neill
4 dispatches · Kīlauea
Searching For Life on the Red Planet
Amy McAdam, a planetary geochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the X-ray diffraction instrument team lead for RIS4E’s Theme 2, spent the June 2015 field test on Kīlauea’s lava flows testing whether volcanic basalt altered by acidic rain could serve as an analog for Martian rock chemistry. Her work aimed to guide future astronauts toward the samples most likely to preserve signs of past life.
ReadReading Mars’ Story
Jennifer Eigenbrode came to planetary geochemistry by way of geology and a lifelong conviction that rocks hold the record of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere. At Kīlauea in June 2015, the NASA Goddard scientist joined the RIS4E field test to work with X-ray diffraction, refining a technique that could one day help astronauts identify minerals on the surface of Mars.
ReadThe Rise of RIS4E: Getting a Grasp on the Solar System
Tim Glotch grew up stargazing in Massachusetts before a childhood spark, NASA’s Pathfinder landing on Mars in 1997, redirected him from galaxies to geology. By 2013 he had assembled a $5.5 million NASA research team at Stony Brook University called RIS4E, pulling together trusted colleagues from Arizona State, NASA Goddard, and Brookhaven to study the rocks of the solar system from the ground up.
ReadX-ray Diffraction
Amy McAdam and Jennifer Eigenbrode hauled a 35-pound portable X-ray diffractometer called Terra across Kīlauea’s lava fields in June 2015, testing how quickly the instrument could identify rock mineralogy in the field. The goal was practical: determine whether a suitcase-sized machine that normally runs for hours in a lab could deliver useful data fast enough to guide astronauts collecting samples on another world.
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