Today at Brown

The Riddle

Three instruments that have returned data from Mars — TES, the Thermal Emissions Spectrometer; OMEGA, which flew aboard a European mission earlier this decade; and GRS, the 2001 Gamma Ray Spectrometer — appear to be telling different stories about the Red Planet.

The Brown team’s objective is to mimic in Iceland what the instruments have done on Mars. The researchers will find terrain that is the Earth’s closest equivalent to the northern latitudes of Mars. Then they will measure the samples at thermal and near infrared, just like the TES and OMEGA instruments. They also will take samples at various depths, extending to 50 centimeters, and bombard them with cosmic rays (through a computerized model), mimicking GRS’s work. They hope that by comparing the results, they can figure out why the instruments are telling different stories. (More on the mission.)

The Team

John “Jack” Mustard
A member of the Geological Sciences faculty since 1996, Mustard has been involved in the exploration of Mars for nearly two decades. He is the deputy principal investigator for the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. His July 2008 paper in Nature used data from CRISM to give the first in-depth look at the various terrains on Mars in which water-bearing minerals were present.

Michael Wyatt
Wyatt, assistant professor of geological sciences, is a member of the Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer team on the Mars Exploration Rover and has worked extensively with other instruments on spacecraft orbiting Mars. He also is a participating scientist on the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter DIVINER instrument that will measure and map lunar surface temperatures and features as NASA prepares to send humans for an extended stay on the Moon.

Bethany Ehlmann
A graduate student in the Department of Geological Sciences and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Ehlmann uses data from CRISM to identify minerals formed by water and determine what this implies about the habitability of ancient Mars. She wrote a paper published in June in Nature Geoscience that found clay deposits in ancient deltas that may be repositories of past life.

Ulyana Horodyskyj
A graduate student in the Department of Geological Sciences and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Horodyskyj combines remote sensing observations with fieldwork in Iceland and Antarctica to better understand the interactions of ice and water with volcanic rocks on Mars. Her research will determine limits on the depth to which chemical alteration has taken place on Mars.

Richard C. Lewis
The physical sciences writer in the University’s Office of Media Relations, Lewis is a former Associated Press reporter in the Providence bureau. He holds a Master of Arts in science journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University