Katherine, just tell us, just so we all understand what actually a meteorite is.

A meteorite is a rock that’s made up of different types of minerals that we find here on the earth that has come from space. So we recognize our meteorite samples as being different from earth rocks because as they burn up through Earth’s atmosphere, they get a black exterior. We call this a fusion crust, and that tells us that they have come from.

An area that’s not earth surface. And then when we look inside and we look at the minerals and what is present within those rocks, we can see that it’s chemically minerologically different to the earth. And that means that it must have come from another planetary body. Now the vast majority of our meteorites come from the asteroid belt.

So these are objects that formed very early on in the solar system. We have about 80,000 meteorites that we found here on Earth. About 46 thousandths that we found in Antarctica. but of those, we have about 900 that have come from the Moon and Mars.

And so we have a mixture of. Meteorites that come from asteroids or meteorites that have come from bigger planet scale bodies.

Why are you, as a planetary scientist who studies moons and other planets, why are you interested in going to Antarctica?

Yeah, well I’d really like to do field work on the moon, but that’s somewhat more expensive

Maybe soon, maybe if the new space race might facilitate that, but for now I’ll settle with the earth.

So planetary science is a very diverse field and involves biologists, physicists, geologists like me. But the geologists like me really like to get our hands on rock samples and. We can send our space missions out and bring material back, and we do that very effectively. Or the other option maybe the slightly lazy option is to wait for the material to come to us here on Earth.

And indeed, back through the whole of Earth’s history space, rocks from asteroids or more icy material have been delivered to the earth through meteors. So fireball events where we see burning material strikes, Earth’s atmosphere, falls as a fireball. Smaller material form shooting stars, and then in some cases we can go out and find those rock samples.

Now we find meteorites all over the earth. We can find them in deserts just sitting around waiting on sandy surfaces for us to collect. We can even see them as fireballs and then track where those fireballs land. And indeed, we’ve done that effectively in the UK and other countries around the earth.

Antarctica actually proves to be one of the best repositories where we can go and collect and recover meteorites

I mean, would you expect Antarctica sort of the end of the earth to be the kind of place that they would sort of collect in some way? Why is it such a good place?

Why is Antarctica such a good place to find meteorites?

Yeah, so. There are no more meteorites delivered to Antarctica than anywhere else in the earth. In fact, we think there’s probably slightly less meteorites delivered to the poles of the earth. the good things about Antarctica.

It has a very stable surface, so there is ice in some places, hundreds of thousands of years old indeed, in some places, a couple of million years old. And that stability provides us with kind of a reservoir of material that just sits there for a long time. So it naturally gathers a lot of these rocks that have been delivered.

Not just at the present day, but back through the last 10,000, a hundred thousand, even back to a couple of million years ago. . The other really nice thing about Antarctica is that it’s a dry desert. Sure it snows, but the precipitation is actually much less than elsewhere on earth and that very cold and water free environment, ironically, once there’s ice, but it’s not a very wet environment for interaction with rocks, means that meteorites can be preserved.

And so if a meteorite falls, say in the uk, it lands in a very damp, wet environment, the minerals within that meteorite. Can break down relatively quickly. Whereas if that meteor, it falls to Antarctica, it can actually be preserved for a much longer period in time.

But the other really cool thing about Antarctica is that we have this natural delivery mechanism. So. Meteorites fall all over Antarctica. They fall onto the ice surface. They get transported in the glaciers that move from the polar plateau out towards the edge of Antarctica. And when those glaciers hit topographic highs, so mountain ranges or buried mountain ranges, the ice slows down and it becomes incredibly slow moving.

And the ice is kind of forced up to the surface. So from depth, couple of kilometers, few hundred meters in depth, and as the ice emerges at the surface, it brings up that rocky cargo to meteorites that have been delivered sitting within the ice. And this kind of conveyor belt delivers loads of meteorites to actually these really nice concentrated areas.

So these blue ice areas that are around mountain ranges. And that means that we can. Go to specific places and we can find actually hundreds or even thousands of meteorites within a few square kilometers of slow moving blue ice. And so it’s easy for us to go and find them. It saves us having to cover large amounts of ground.

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So you can get lots of meteorites there. It kind of makes sense why as a planetary scientist you’d want to go to Antarcticathis is about as close as you get to going to another planet on earth, isn’t it?

It’s that actually very similar kind of. Isolation experience, teamwork, environment. So the way that we recover Metre and Antarctica, and this is the case for different teams that goes to different nations that do meteor recovery, is you travel to one of the main research stations, but then you really have to be transported out into the deep field.

So this is deep field work, hundreds of kilometers away from the main research stations and. Most scientific expeditions stay in two person tents, or indeed, in the case of the Japanese and Belgiums, they actually stay in these cool little small habitats rather than tents. Teams as people are very small, typically four people to eight people, no more than that.

So it’s a very isolated experience and indeed NASA has included astronauts on some of the meteorite recovery expeditions that the US Antarctic Meteorite Ands Met program runs to provide them with quite a similar analog field work experience to that, that they will go on to experience in space.

And the experience of finding Meteoritesis really good for sort of recognizing the weird things.

so when you do the field work, although you are in icey areas, there’s often a lot of. Geology around. So you are near mountain ranges. There’s a lot of terrestrial geology, which is cool for people like me that like rocks. ’cause you spend quite a lot of time looking at incredibly different diverse Antarctic geology.

but your job is to spot the weird things, the things that shouldn’t be there. The non-terrestrial stuff. And meteorites have a very character. Black exterior because they’ve had this heating, this ablation as they’ve come down through earth’s atmosphere. Some are brown and some actually don’t even have this exterior in the first place, but they still have a different color, a different characteristic.

So quite a lot of what we do initially is train our eyes to look for the different things, the weird things that don’t look like the other rocks. And so the same is true for training astronauts to be sent to. Future destinations on the lunar surface is you are always trying to do a quick analysis of what the local geology’s like, and then the training goes, that you are being trained to find the specific samples to test the science goals.

So Antarctic meteorite hunting is sort of, it’s a really good preliminary field work for hopefully when humans will go out and search other planets in the solar system.

Well, meanwhile, whilst that is happening on Antarctica, once you collect a bunch of meteorites in a particular place in the field work how do you know where they’ve come from?

So most of that type of analysis happens in the labs when we kind of get them back outta Antarctica.

When you’re in the field, you can use the color of the meteorite to give you a little bit of a hint for how it is related to the main meteorite groups If you’re just comparing them to rocks you have already.

Exactly. So these are comparing them to meteorites, let’s say, of. Fallen or that we have found in hot desert environments. But most of that analysis comes from looking at their chemistry and their mineral allergy. So what we do is we return them, we slice a little piece off them, we polish that little slice down, and we make a polish block

So a thin piece of rock, no thicker than a human hair. And we look at that down on microscopes. And when we do that, we can relate that to our understanding of what types of asteroids exist. Indeed, we can occasionally spot a really rare and unusual one, which may have come from a larger planetary body like the Moon or like Mars, or from one of our really big asteroids like asteroid, Vesta.

And so it’s kind of a process of what’s the mineralallergy, what’s the chemistry? Then we may perform more detailed analysis to look at specific elements that could help us to really fingerprint that. And when we do that type of analysis, we find that most of the samples that we recover have originated from asteroids.

So these are relatively common types of asteroids. We call these meteorites, the ordinary choros. We find that some are really rich in organic materials, and these have come from asteroids that actually originated in the outer solar system. So these are bodies that probably had a lot of ice on at some point in their past.

And then we have the weird ones, and these are the ones that differentiate into a core and mantle and a crust. And we find examples of iron rich meat traits that come from the cause. Of early planetary bodies, and these are made nearly entirely of metal made of iron and nickel metal. And then we have our examples that were made maybe in the surfaces of volcanoes that operated on the surfaces of some asteroids early in their history.

So there really is a myriad of different types, and every meteorite scientist has their favorite group that they work on to test the specific questions about how that asteroid or that body formed and evolved.

why is it that scientists like you want to study meteorites?

, so most of it is about how the solar system worked. So how do those fundamental blocks of dust and gassy materials that existed 4.56 billion years ago agglomerate together to start to form boulders that smash together to then form bigger and bigger planets?

And then every unique meteorite we find has the potential to tell us about a completely new body that existed. So that gives us this kind of family picture. Of how the solar system would’ve looked. Really early on in its history. And then ultimately what we’re really interested in is then how did the really big planets form, so how did all these small objects crash together to form planets like Mercury, the earth itself and our moon, and then Venus and Mars as well.

And then we’re also really interested to find out how material moved around. In the subsequent four and a half billion years, and this is sort of the delivery of volatile material, particularly to the earth, so was all the water that is constantly falling in Manchester on my head, was that delivered at some point in the past from the icy rich material of volatile rich asteroids struck the early earth ringing large amounts of water.

So the reason why we maybe have an atmosphere, oceans, rivers, systems, is because maybe all of that water was actually brought to the earth. By these big events.

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Do we know where these rocks came from? Because if you think about what asteroids and things are at the edge of the solar system, they’re basically bits of rock that have been around since the beginning of the solar system billions of years ago that didn’t quite make it into planets, and they’re just floating around very, very far away and occasionally come into the inner solar system.

But do we know which direction?

Yeah, so sort of early on we think that the rocks would’ve basically come from anywhere. So it could have come from the main asteroid belt, which is located between the orbits and Mars and Jupiter. They could have come from much further out, so beyond Jupiter heading towards the outer solar system where our comets exist right now at the present day.

Most of the asteroids that are delivered to the earth originate in the main asteroid belt. So this is a really mixed environment. They’re not all made of the same stuff. Different parts of the asteroid belt have different rocks associated with them, and what happens is sometimes those rocks collide with each other.

Sometimes those asteroids surfaces are heated up by sunlight. They tumble outta control and they’re knocked onto orbits that potentially intersect with Mars. They potentially intersect with the orbit of the earth. We call these near earth asteroids. And so these are the ones that we are very worried about.

In terms of observing for potential risks at the present day and in the future. So potentially hazardous asteroids, large objects that could strike the earth and cause damage. But we also look to these as our asteroids are bringing our fantastic meteorites that we can analyze for science.

I was gonna ask about that because it sort of sits there in the background of this conversation about things hitting the earth and we’re talking so far about very small rocks that have ended up on Antarctica, and I’m sure people have seen pictures of shooting stars that end up in all sorts of other places too.

Of course, things hitting the earth can be scary. How much of a risk is it that we might get hit by something massive that could be problematic? I mean, it’s certainly been problematic in the past. I mean, the dinosaurs didn’t do well as a result of a massive asteroid hitting the earth.

so every day dust size material is delivered to the earth.

So this is kind of that shooting star size material, mostly from comets tails, but also from interplanetary dust that’s originated from asteroids. Happens all the time. We’re gathering space dust as we speak. Material on sort of a few centimeters to a few 10 centimeters in size. Probably objects like that hit about once or twice a day, and most of the time we don’t notice.

They fall over the oceans, they disappear into the oceans. We get delivered to the earth. Probably recoverable meteorites on the sort of the size of about 20 to 50 hand sized pieces of rock each. About every 10 to 20 years, we get bigger objects, one meter size objects that hit, and these are the ones that start to potentially worry us.

That sounds big. They sound big. The biggest one that fell recently was in Chelyabinsk in Russia. I think that was in about 2013 or so, and that was a object that 17 meters in size struck the atmosphere and exploded. And when it exploded, it caused a. Airburst event. So a big shockwave that hit Earth’s surface and it blew out loads of windows in the City of Chelyabinsk

It actually caused hundreds of millions billion dollars of damage in insurance claims. People actually had burns from looking at the infrared heat generated in that fireball event. So it was relatively localized, but actually very dramatic. That must have been terrifying for anyone who saw it without knowing what it was.

But it was a relatively small event, but we did not see that one coming. This object was not observed before it hit the earth. It kind of snuck in, and that’s kind of the worrying thing. We are really challenged to observe objects under about a hundred meters in size, and this is where technology is getting better.

Observatory are tracking the really big objects. There’s a really cool telescope that’s just come online called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which one of its goals is to map these objects to really understand their orbits. And predict when big things might hit the earth in the future. Now, what we might do about one of these really big objectsis a little bit worry.

Short of bringing Bruce Willis outta retirement, there isn’t a really good plan at the moment. This is called the area of planetary defense. There have been some tests where a NASA mission visited an asteroid and actually crashed another small spacecraft probe into that asteroid to deflect it slightly.

And then the European Space Agency has a follow-up mission to go and actually observe what the effects of this asteroid deflection activity is.

What were the results of those experiments? Did they work? They did work. They have deflected the kind of this moon of this asteroid a little bit, but.

Whether we could do this very rapidly, you know, the timescales, we could deflect an asteroid and really how effect it is. So we, we’ve kind of shifted the orbit by a couple of centimeters. Is this enough that if we see something really big coming to the earth, could we knock it outta the way before it strikes our atmosphere is a big, outstanding question.

I mean, people have probably seen that movie Don’t look up, you know, this is a potential risk at a hazard to the earth for the future that space agencies are worried about.

The idea of a earth destroying asteroid, it is rare. It’s not impossible, of course, but. Has the risk changed over time, or is it just that these things don’t happen until every a hundred or 200 or billion years or something?

So the risks have probably been relatively constant back about three and a half billion years.

So before about three and a half, 4 billion years ago. There was a lot of big things flying around the solar system. This is when we get the really big impact basins on Mars, on mercury and on the moon. So every time you look up at the moon, you see these big circular structures. They were made by the really big things that struck early on this period of really heavy bombardment since about three and a half billion years ago.

The material that’s available in the solar system has been depleted. It’s crashed into the sun. It’s crashed into other plants, and so the rate of bombardment has really dropped off, but that’s not to say every few hundred million years, something really big just happens to fly around and create a new impact event.

You mentioned the dinosaurs being wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous before the tertiary boundary, so 60 odd million years ago. That was a bad day on earth. An object about 10 kilometers hit. It created an impact crater about 150 kilometers in diameter. You know, mass extinction events scales, but there have been subsequent impacts such as one hit Germany about 15 million years ago that created a crater about 20 kilometers in diameter.

Meteor crater in Arizona, a smaller one kilometer crater struck only, you know, a few tens of thousands of years ago. So these are kind of regionally destructive, where small areas of the earth would’ve been. Covered with rocks, would’ve had fires that would’ve wiped out vegetation, but sort of on a scale of regions rather than continents and global wide as we had when the dinosaurs died.

MUSIC BREAK 2

I’m curious to know where the history of meteorite hunting Antarctic comes from. So you describe this method of finding these meteorites there, and it’s an amazing place to do it.

And why we look for them, but who had the idea first of going to Antarctica to look for meteorites?

So the first meteorites were found in the early 19 hundreds actually by Australian explorers on the Morrison’s expedition. Found this rock, recognized it was weird, and returned it, and then scientists recognized the fact that this was akin to other strange looking non earth-like rock.

So they weren’t looking for meteorites there. They just found an old rock. This was just a serendipitous discovery, which is often how the best science is done. And then in the 1970s, uh, Japanese expedition visited one of these blue ice areas, so these slow moving ice areas that are close to the mountain ranges, and they found.

Quite a few samples in this relatively small area, and an American scientist was sitting at a conference, bill Cassidy, who heard this and thought, well, this is very odd because we don’t find tens of meteorites anywhere else on earth or with this very close vicinity. So he got talking to the Japanese colleagues and they proposed this hypothesis to say that there was this kind of delivery mechanism where meteorites are transported to these.

Blue ice areas and then they proposed to go and test this hypothesis. So there was a joint Japanese and US Expedition to Perform the first systematic meteorite recovery in Antarctica, and this was very successful. They recovered tens and hundreds of meteorites and proved that blue ice areas close to mountain ranges are great recovery sites.

And then these nations went their own separate ways, and the US carried out meteorite hunting all through the late seventies through the eighties, the nineties, pretty much every year, barring a few. Delays and breaks in their activities and ANSMET has recovered tens of thousands of meteorites, mostly from along the trans Antarctic mountain range.

The central mountain range that spans the middle of Antarctica, the Japanese search in slightly different areas and other expeditions led by the Chinese, the Koreans, the Belgiums, have kind of come online as well over the years and performed recovery in different areas where we have mountain ranges scattered around the edge of the continent.

So my research on lunar samples comes from working a lot with the meteorites that were recovered through the US Antarctic program, and this is the program that I first did meteorite recovery with.

So they take scientists that are involved with planetary science and meteorite recovery. To Antarctica to take part in these programs. And I think I wrote five letters over seven years, begging to be a team member, kind of saying, I think I’m okay. I, you know, I could cope with cold. I understand how to do field work.

I wrote these pretty desperate letters and in the end I was selected as a team member and I was really lucky I got to do two expeditions with the US team in 2012 and then again in 2013.

Let’s talk about those because I’d love to know how you set up those expeditions and how you felt before you went.

You know, you’ve been selected for this expedition. It kind of feels like being selected as like an astronaut, to be honest, to go to the Space Station.

So tell us what it was like to prepare for this expedition.

Yeah, so you are getting involved with a very well established expedition. There is an amazing field guide, Johnny Scott, who’s been doing this field work for years and years and years. it’s exactly like a space mission.

You have a leader and you have, you know, there’re people that sort of plug into different roles. You fly to Christchurch in New Zealand, you get all of your field gear. You deploy out on a US military style C 17 craft to McMurdo. You do training in McMurdo. You learn how to ride a skidoo, which is just the coolest thing.

You learn how to pitch a tent, you learn how to, you know, cook your food, live in that kind of very isolated setting, and then you deploy out to the deep field. We deployed out on a Hercules, so again, on another military aircraft, and then we deployed out even to the further field in a Twin Otter spacecraft.

So you kind of get on these increasingly smaller and smaller planes and you see less and less people, and then you pitch your tent in just the most. Beautiful place you can imagine. So surrounded by mountains, blue ice everywhere. A new land under blue skies because you’ve got to have the right weather to deploy.

Half the challenge. I’m sure everybody that does fieldwork and Antarctica knows is waiting for the right weather conditions.

And then you get on your Skidoo and every day you get up and you go to work. So you drive out on your Skidoo to the field site, which can be a few kilometers away. You all align yourself in a line. So there’s about 10 to 20 meters between you and the next Skidoo rider, and then a little bit like a police search team.

You drive your Ski-Doo in a straight line. And you look either side as you drive and you are looking for that black rock sitting on the white ice or the weird looking rock. How fast are you going? ’cause that sounds quite difficult. Yeah, you’re not going too fast about 10 kilometers an hour or so, and you are constantly scouring in front of you for hazards.

So no deep crevasses, but ultimately you are scouring for that one tiny rock sample. and at the moment you spot that Black Rock, you stop your skidoo far away from the sample.

So you do not contaminate it with your skidoo fuel. When you say far away, I mean these are the tiny little things, how do you see them so far away? Yeah, I have fortunately good eyesight. It really depends on the size of the rock. So if you see a rock that’s about the size of a watermelon, you can see that from a hundred meters away, a few tens of meters away, and you know something good’s coming.

And it’s completely white or blue eyes around you. So the contrast and color sticks out, I guess in most cases, that is easy to see. The small ones, the few centimeters in size, they sort of show up when you’re about five meters away from them, you know? And when you’re getting down to things at a size of a pea, you have to be right next to it.

So a couple of meters. But once you see, when you stop your skidoo. You wave your arms in the air and then all your teammates come over to the person that’s found that meteorite sample and they gather around. We take a GPS coordinate of where we found the sample. Then we spend some time collecting it. So we photograph it, which is called the mugshot photograph, to make sure you have a good idea of what it looks like on the ice, and then you pick it up using tongs and you put it into a bag.

So we don’t touch the meteorites with our gloves as best we can. we then back it up, give it a number and make some notes about the site it’s being collected from. And that process could take anywhere from a few minutes to few tens of minutes, depending on how complex it is.

Sometimes the meteorites are stuck in the ice and you have to check them out. Sometimes they’re just sitting nicely on the top and doing all of that. It’s, you know, minus 10 degrees centigrade, minus 20 degrees centigrade with a wind blowing can be desperately unpleasant. You are trying to take photographs with very thin gloves, or indeed with no gloves.

You are trying not to let the meteorite blow away,but other times it can be lovely and pleasant.

Have you had that happen? I had that happen on one of the British missions,. I collected a sample in a bag, and then the wind whi the bag outta my hand.

I mean, this is a very small sample, a centimeter or so in size. It was very lightweight. The winds were very strong. Automatically, your default response is to. Chase the bag as you would. Yeah. You know, anywhere else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course being on blue ice, blue ice is very slippery. And so the first thing I did is I fell on my ass.

And of course you say, ah, oh. And all you can see is this little bag, plastic bag disappearing at speed across the surface. So you have this split second decision about what to do. Now in this particular scenario, there was only two of us. So there was me. And my field guide taf, who is amazing, and you have to decide what is the priority.

So what I did was I took the decision, I dunno why I did it, actually thinking back, is I dropped my field book, I dropped the camera. And I left Taf to deal with that, and I jumped on the skidoo, and I chased the meteorite. You wanted this meteorite? Yeah, I really wanted it, so I chased it. I tried to intercept it, and then I stopped the skidoo, and of course the meteorite flew by me.

I was a terrible catch. So I had to do this a second time, and somehow on the second time of getting ahead. Meteorite blowing on the surface in the back. I managed to stop it, pick it up, and then I returned to the collection site with it in hand. Incredibly joyous.
This is way more adventurous and potentially dangerous than I imagined picking up meteorites and Antarctica to be. I mean, uh, bruise bottom was worthwhile to get this one bad. Thinking about that. If you are chasing this bag through the Antarctic winds, you’ve also got to be very aware of the fact that you are looking ahead of you.

But then underneath you, there could be all sorts of crevasses and other problems. You are constantly risk assessing. you are constantly looking around for dangers.

I should clarify that this happened in an area where we had searched before, so we knew there was no big crevasses. We knew it was safe, and there was very good visibility to see what was around so you can kind of see what’s coming in front of you.

I think I know the answer to this question, but I think it’d be great to hear you articulate it. What’s it actually like when you find one of these things?
Oh, it’s a massive buzz. You immediately asked the question, you asked, what is it? You know, is this weird one? Is this a cool one? You know, does it have a beautiful fusion crust? And then you have to sort of say, no, these is not the questions I need to be solving right now.

My priority is to collect this, but you really, you want to be the one to find the meteorites. You know, there is nothing more annoying than somebody cutting into your track and they get the meteorite before. There’s also nothing more annoying than having a day where you don’t find anything, right? So your goal is to ultimately find as many samples as possible, and some days that just doesn’t happen.

Either the weather’s bad, you have to come back to camp. The conditions aren’t good. It’s too windy. It’s blowing snow, which covers your visibility for finding them. Or there’s just some places you go to that you think are going to be great ice fields and there’s nothing there, and you get back and you’re just like, oh, today was not a good day because we didn’t find anything.

SHave you got plans to go back? So we did a UK led meteorite recovery expedition working with the British Antarctic survey.

This was a very cool project that took place in 2018 to 19, and then 19 to 20 where we did two expeditions to prove that there are meteorites bearing ice fields in Antarctica that are accessible by BAS. We proved that that was a. Good day. We found the first meteorite, a lot of planning work had gone in by our team in Manchester to predict ice fields that we thought were really good meteorite bearing zones, and our predictions proved correct and we found samples that we could collect.

And we also carried out a really cool experiment to try and find iron meteorites. We actually took metal detection equipment to try and find meteorites that were rich in iron that were. Not sitting on the surface, but buried within the ice. I I’m gonna cut. Very long story short. We dragged around these metal detectors that were designed and built to find metal rich meteorites and. Unfortunately the equipment didn’t work as well as we expected. This is one of those classic Antarctica. What’d expect Antarctica?

It was actually the electronics worked. The cold wasn’t the problem. What was the problem was surface of these blue ice fields is actually quite rough, and it has these scallops ice on the surface. And as we drag the equipment across. The shock of driving were quite robust. Electronics and quite robust hardware actually created a massive amount of damage.

So we had breakages in the hardware, we had breakages in the electronics, and we had an electronic engineer who bless him, was soldering wires in a tent, you know, in very cold conditions the whole time. But anyway, after two weeks of doing this activity, we decided we couldn’t do this anymore.

The upside was we still recovered a lot of surface meteorite.

The good news of having done these expeditions is we know where to go. We know how to do this. We know how to collect meteorites properly. We know how to bring them back to the uk. The meteorites we recovered have all been classified. They’re now in the Natural History Museum in London, available for the entire scientific community to study.

So I think we’ve placed ourselves really well to do this again and to have a long term UK led meteorite Antarctic recovery program where you never know. We may find that one really weird martian meteorite sample that has evidence of life in it. We may find the one meteorite that’s come from Mercury.

All these unique possibilities. This is why we keep going back.

I think you’ve made the case. I think that in this conversation, I think people will fully support the idea of finding more of these amazing rocks that can tell us all about the dif parts of the solar system.

It’s either that or you need to fund me to send a mission to the moon, right? So, uh, you can do that as well. I’m very happy to take your money to either or sample return mission to mass. on a selfish level, doing more field work in Antarctica would be amazing. Being a Luna scientist, having samples returned from a crude human mission to the moon while we’re sending out astronauts, I just think both for science and for. Collectively bringing humanity together, you know, and that’s hopefully what will happen with the Artemis missions going back to the moon with the US led venture, or our Chinese colleagues sending Chinese astronauts to the moon.

I am very excited to see that happen in the next five years.

Why does Antarctica matter to you ?

It matters because it is this archive of solar system history here on the earth. It is unique in that aspect. It preserves that record better than anywhere else on Earth’s surface. So it’s a time capsule of solar system history.

And on a personal level, it matters to me because it is the most. Beautiful place I have ever been. It is very far from home. It’s very far from friends and family and it is very far from my garden and my plants that I love very much. But it quite literally takes your breath away, both in terms of being cold and just buzz old and used the word magnificent desolation to describe the moon.

And I think those words are equally applicable to Antarctica. They certainly are. And Katherine, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. thank you for having me.