Scientists dig rocks in Scotland to learn about Mars samples
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A report published by CBC on Saturday is highlighting the work of Mariek Schmidt, an Earth sciences professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, who with the help of five other scientists, has amassed over 300 kilograms of 90-million-year-old igneous rocks from the Scottish Isle of Rumin.
The piles of rock will now help to teach students how to handle the Mars samples that NASA's Perseverance rover will be collecting over the next 10 years.
Being prepared
"We probably collected over 300 kilograms of material that can then be used by engineers and scientists on Earth in order to be prepared for when this samples come back from Mars," she told the news outlet.
The project is being conducted in collaboration with NASA and the European Space Agency.
"Those space rocks, as you might imagine, they're going to be extremely valuable," she explained to CBC. "When they come back we're going to want to have procedures in place in order to work with those samples."
Lydia Hallis, a planetary science associate professor at the University of Glasgow, who partook in the mission says the rocks collected from Scotland are similar to the ones found in Mars despite being much younger.
"Even though the Martian rocks are much older, the weathering rate on Mars is much slower. So younger rocks in Scotland, where it rains a lot, get weathered quicker," she told the CBC.
Although the scientist has already tackled moon samples brought back from the Apollo missions for her PhD, she is really looking forward to the Martian ones because they are the first to come back from another planet.
The first from another planet
"The moon is interesting, but we know there was never life on the moon. We don't know that about Mars. We know that it's much more of a varied environment with rain, with lakes, with rivers..." she told the CBC. "We've never collected samples from another planet before."
She added that the Mars samples are unique in that they are derived from much farther away and are being collected by "robotic instruments and tiny little helicopters."
The scientist highlighted that the Mars samples will be crucial for research on planet formation and possibly how the universe came to be.
"The samples that come back, they won't just tell us about how Mars formed. They will tell us about how planets form in our solar system, in other solar systems around other stars," she told CBC.
"We'll get to figure out whether we're alone in the universe."
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