Planetary Radio Live with Mat Kaplan and Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye at the Science Museum Oklahoma Science Live Auditorium featured two OU researchers on Wednesday.
They were: Nathan Kaib, professor of astrophysics, who discussed the formation of Mars; and Megan Elwood Madden, professor of geology and geophysics, who talked about the interaction of rocks and brine on Mars.
Elwood Madden and her team are studying the interaction of Martian rocks and brine—salt water that scientists suspect is active at and below the planet’s surface. By studying this interaction, through laboratory experiments, field studies and geochemical models, they can predict what new minerals are created and what nutrients are leached from the minerals as a result.
By understanding these geochemical interactions, Elwood Madden can get to the big question: can the nutrients ultimately produced by rock-brine interactions sustain life? Elwood Madden is answering these questions by developing techniques and tools to analyze the brines on Mars with Raman spectrometers, instruments that will be included on the next two Mars rovers. By measuring the chemistry of alien brines, these missions can provide more information about potential habitats for life on Mars.
Kaib’s research uses computer simulations to model the growth of rocky planets like the Earth and Mars from a sea of smaller rocky objects that orbited the young Sun. One challenge of this type of work is that models that form an Earth-size planet near Earth’s location also consistently form an Earth-size planet near Mars’ location. This strongly conflicts with our actual solar system where Mars has approximately 10% the mass of the Earth.
One solution to the so-called “small Mars problem” is that the distant gas giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn, which formed before the Earth and Mars) somehow altered the formation process of the solar system’s rocky planets. Kaib is studying how changes in their orbits and stability can alter the formation of rocky planets and potentially resolve the small Mars problem.