Shelbie Harris
News Editor
This summer, the Craters of the Moon Monument and National Preserve located in the Arco Desert acted as a 1,117 square mile research laboratory to study volcanic processes and planetary exploration on the moon, and other planets.
ISU researchers and NASA are working on two separate projects with the first being the NASA “Field Investigation to Enable Solar System Science and Exploration” (FINESSE) mission project.
“The goal of FINESSE is, we’re trying to understand the textures of lava flows and how those textures are scalable in a quantitate sense,” said Shannon Kobs Nawotniak, ISU geosciences assistant professor.
“Depending on the radar tools that we used to look at lava flows, most looked super smooth and that’s just because the scale of what the roughness was. All these sensors are working at one targeted scale, but at people scale, actually trying to walk on this terrain was just crazy.”
The original plan was to bring planetary rovers out to Craters of the Moon, but the terrain was simply too difficult for the rovers to navigate.
This issue was a microcosm of what researchers are dealing with in regards to actual Mars exploration.
“We need to understand these scales of roughness and how we can interpret them both from an exploration side, being actually able to put rovers or landers out in these places, and from a science side we’re really interested in what these changes in roughness tell us about the eruption itself,” said Nawotniak.
Unlike Earth, planets such as Mars or other astral bodies including the moon do not have plate tectonics or oceans. However, the major factors that have controlled the surface areas of these planets are volcanoes and impact craters.
Understanding volcanic processes on Earth can allow researchers to understand more about how the moon or other planets are developing.
“Some of the lava flows at Craters of the Moon are some of the roughest known on Earth,” said Nawotniak, adding, “Despite the fact that in the initial radar signal they didn’t look that bad.”
Researchers are using very high-resolution tools such as differential GPS to measure at 15-centimeter increments and have now included using unmanned aircraft systems, or drones to get this increment down to 2 centimeters.
The information gathered by the differential GPS and drones is then spliced together to obtain the most accurate measurements possible.
In addition to the FINESSE project, NASA and ISU researchers are working on the NASA “Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains” (BASALT) project which focuses on how microbial, or minute life forms such as bacteria and viruses, evolve on lava flows.
“The BASALT project focused not on the terrains, but to actually understand the extent to which the rocks themselves influence microhabitat,” said Nawotniak. “We’re working with a team of microbiologists on this project to see at the microbe scale which things are growing where based on the changes in the rocks themselves.”
In terms of Mars exploration, we are long past the search for little green men on the planet. Microbial habitat is what is driving the search for life on Mars in the modern age.
Nawotniak said we do not know enough about how particular microbes work on Earth, let alone on other planets in the galaxy.
“We’re working on a proposal right now to extend this research to the sea floor,” said Nawotniak.
These two projects together have brought in about $900,000 in grant funds to ISU and this summer’s fieldwork received widespread national media coverage in August.
Nawotniak worked with Scott Hughes, ISU geosciences professor emeritus and co-principal investigator on this grant as well as three ISU graduate and two undergraduate students during the fieldwork this summer.
“The research is super awesome, and these projects are paying for ISU students to be involved,” Nawotniak said. “I study volcanoes as my specialty and I’m getting to study them in Idaho, while also getting to feel like I’m halfway in a “Star Trek” episode, while on top of that I’m getting paid to pretend to be an astronaut.”
