Indiana Alumni Magazine
Big Red Planet
Indiana University Bloomington became a base for Mars study — practically overnight. Here’s how it happened.
By David Bricker
MARS CREW — IU’s Mars researchers include (left to right) Lisa Pratt, Carl Bauer, David Bish, Abhijit
Basu, PhD’75, and Juergen Schieber. Bauer is a biologist; the others are geologists. Photo
Tyagan Miller.
Late last summer, Indiana stargazers looked up and saw something that startled them.
It wasn't Mars. Not exactly. It's true, our mysterious celestial neighbor was quite a sight flying across our August night skies, closer to us and brighter than it had been in 50,000 years, but no, it wasn't Mars. What surprised astronomy enthusiasts was who was doing the looking.
By the end of 2003, the number of IU Bloomington faculty scientists with either an active or past interest in Mars almost tripled, from three professors to eight. All of IU's expertise is related, directly or obliquely, to the centuries-old question yet unanswered: Does Mars have — or has it ever had — life?
The unusual and sudden concentration of Mars experts at a single American university is no mere coincidence, of course. Recently promised federal funding for Mars research and exploration has ignited scientific interest in Mars across the country. But the number of scientists at IU who study or have studied Mars is unusual for an institution that has never been given a formal mandate, as Purdue, Texas A&M, and Howard universities have. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) designated these schools as Specialized Centers of Research and Training.
Perhaps it was merely astrological fate that IU should find itself aligned with eight stars and one planet. Whether propelled by IU's own NASA-funded institute, errant Martian meteorites, or the possibilities of water and life on Mars, IU scientists are helping our ever-curious species answer some of its most pressing questions about our nearest planetary neighbor.
ASTROBIOLOGY INSTITUTE
IUB geologist Lisa Pratt is the director of a new NASA Astrobiology Institute at IU. That the institute, which fosters cooperation among scientists from three universities, was established at IU has created more than a little buzz among scientists and science enthusiasts. It's a coup for IU, and particularly for Pratt, who is gaining recognition as an expert on "life in extreme environments," as she likes to call her ongoing work.
Pratt has been a member of the IUB geological sciences faculty since 1986, so her snagging of the NASA Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee Astrobiology Institute, or "IPTAI," had everything to do with the professional respect she's earned for past geology- and biology-related work at IU.
Pratt's long list of titles — professor of geological sciences, Gill Fellow, biogeochemist, stratigrapher, sedimentologist, All-Around Swell Person — is outmatched only by her portfolio of active research projects. Among these, Pratt is looking for unusual micro-organisms that live in, around, and under salty alkaline lakes in southern Oregon.
She's joined in this endeavor by IUB biologist Carl Bauer and IUB chemist Don Burke.
Pratt's search for life in extreme environments has taken her even farther (and deeper) afield. For the past several years, she's traveled to South Africa's dry Witwatersrand Basin every other year to look for micro-organisms that live in solid rock. She and her devoted crew descend a two-mile-deep mine shaft to sample hydrothermal brines containing bacteria that somehow manage to eke out a living without oxygen — or much in the way of nutrients.
Pratt's Oregon and South Africa projects help clarify the boundaries of life and what it needs to exist, a key element of humanity's search for life on other planets and moons.
That search must be a labor of love. "I don't like caves and dark places," Pratt says. "And it's very, very dark down there. Not to mention hot and humid. There are explosive gases … even a camera flash might set them off.
"All this, just to find a few microscopic, living bacteria within these two-billion-year-old rocks."
Other IU members of the $5-million, five-year IPTAI are geologist Edward Ripley, who is a co-investigator; artist Ruth Droppo; and University Information Technology Services staff members Douglas Pearson and Michael Jasiak, all at IUB.
LIFE IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS
Bauer, who is collaborating with Pratt on the southern Oregon project, was a member of Arizona State University's Astrobiology Institute (ASUAI), one of 1998's original 11 institutes. ASUAI scientists combined everything they knew about the origins of life on Earth with what they thought could be possible elsewhere. They explained to NASA how life might have arisen on the two solar system locales where scientists currently believe life might exist (besides Earth, of course) — Mars and the Jovian moon Europa. Bauer, an expert on photosynthesis and other biochemical processes, also knows a lot about how environmental factors, such as light or oxygen, influence the behavior of living cells.
Pratt is also working with IUB chemist Gary Hieftje on a project that recently came into being because of IPTAI. Hieftje is an analytical chemist par excellence, whose laboratory looks as much like a futuristic inventor's shop as a place of scientific inquiry. He, Pratt, postdoctoral fellow Francisco Andrade, and graduate student Andrew Szumlas (both in Hieftje's lab) are developing a lifesensing probe that they hope to test-deploy in the Arctic ice sometime in 2005. Pratt knows what to look for; Hieftje is the scientist-inventor who designs the complex scientific instruments that help her look.
WATER ON MARS
While Pratt, Ripley, Bauer, and Hieftje all have Mars connections forged or inspired by NASA astrobiology institutes, IUB geologist David Bish's contribution to IU's Mars concentration is more serendipitous.
Bish is a widely esteemed expert on clays and clay-like rocks, so much so that the IUB geological sciences faculty offered Bish the Haydn Murray Chair in applied clay mineralogy in fall 2003. Inside Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the site of a proposed high-level radioactive waste-storage facility, Bish studies clays and minerals called zeolites. But it turns out his interest in these rocks doesn't end where Earth's atmosphere begins. It was just luck for Indiana's Mars lovers that Bish happens to be a big Mars junkie (many geologists are) who is currently bringing his expertise to the study of clay-like minerals on the Martian surface.
Bish and longtime Los Alamos National Laboratory colleagues showed last year in the solar-system journal Icarus that zeolites and clays, assumed to be spread across the Martian surface, could contain water.
The finding surprised some scientists who had thought that low surface pressure and relatively high temperatures on Mars would have caused all water to eventually evaporate into the Martian atmosphere. This may seem strange given that, on the most sweltering Martian summer days, temperatures only reach 35 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 tops. Mars scientists had assumed the thin atmosphere would suck water out of the ground and force it to evaporate. Bish helped demonstrate that zeolites and clays can easily trap water even under these normally evaporative conditions, raising the hope that Martian life might somehow be able to use the water inside water-soaked clays and zeolites to grow and reproduce.
Scientists won't know for sure whether Mars actually has water-retaining minerals until some future Earth-borne probe uses something called an X-ray diffractometer to irradiate the Martian rocks and analyze the results. Problem is, most X-ray diffractometers are about the size of two refrigerators — a crushing payload atop NASA's diminutive rovers. To solve that problem, Bish, Los Alamos National Lab's David Vaniman and Steve Chipera, NASA Ames Research Center's David Blake and Philippe Sarrazin, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's S. Andrew Collins have been working to engineer a shrunken diffractometer for NASA. So far, the team has gotten the device down to toaster-size, which is, remarkably, still too big. "We've got to get the diffractometer down to the size of a Coke can," Bish said. "We think we can do it in time to get the device on a 2009 mission."
MARTIAN METEORITE
Last year, Juergen Schieber, another IUB geologist, published a paper in the journal Geology suggesting the famous meteorite ALH84001, found in Antarctica and believed to have originated on Mars, probably does not contain a fossil of bacteria-like life after all.
When scientists at Johnson Space Center and Stanford University asserted in 1996 that a curious structure inside ALH84001 might be the fossil of bacteria-like cells, a din of scientific speculation soon followed. Some geologists and astrobiologists believed they at last had the evidence of Martian life they'd sought all their professional lives. But a recent string of studies has cast increasing doubt on that conjecture, and Schieber's Geology article has been received by many as the final word, effectively putting all hope of an ALH84001 fossil to rest.
In fact, former National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell told a group of scientists and science journalists at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that Schieber and University of Texas-Arlington coauthor Howard Arnott have argued convincingly that non-living processes could have easily formed ALH84001's spherical and cylindrical "cells." Colwell told her audience to keep looking.
Despite ALH84001's false hope, Schieber remains actively interested in geological evidence of bacterial and bacteria-like life beyond Earth. But for people to know what they're looking at, Schieber says scientists must better understand how processes that shape fossils are different than the ones that shape casts of mud or clay. "One crucial thing we need to do," Schieber explains, "is understand what happens to bacteria when they die."
RIVERS RAN RED WITH SILT
IUB Geological Sciences Department Chairman Abhijit Basu, PhD'75, is a petrologist and a sedimentologist who is greatly interested in the moon and Mars. Basu can help figure out not only where a rock came from, but also what geological processes are likely to have pushed it around and shaped it.
Sedimentologists like Basu are intensely interested in what appear to be dried-up riverbeds on Mars. "If these were riverbeds," Basu says, "they may have at one time contained flowing, liquid water." To know for sure, future human exploration of Mars must delve into these depressions, in search of the evidence that sedimentologists back on Earth need. So far, scientists have only had high-resolution photographs to work with.
THE VIKING MISSIONS
The last of IU's Mars scientists is School of Public and Environmental Affairs Distinguished Professor Ronald Hites, who may seem the least likely member of the IU Mars group. It was Hites, after all, whose most noted contributions to the scientific literature in the last two years do not seem at all Mars-related.
Hites, who sometimes calls himself a "humble chemist," coauthored a 2003 study showing that polybrominated diphenyl ethers, commonly used as flame retardants in furniture and electronics, were present at alarmingly high levels in mothers and their infants. The study has been a cornerstone of scientific evidence in the state of California's deliberations over whether to ban the import of furniture and electronics containing the potentially carcinogenic chemical. Last year, Hites made world news with a study showing high levels of PCBs and other organochlorotoxins in salmon that are raised on fish farms.
But it was also Hites who worked with Klaus Biemann, team leader of NASA's 1976 Viking organic compound-search experiments, on developing an instrument that could detect organic chemicals. Hites doesn't study Mars now, but he brings a historical perspective to discussions of humanity's evolving methods for sniffing out life elsewhere in the solar system.
ASTROBIOLOGY PROGRAM AT IU?
At Arizona State University, scientists and administrators smoothly transitioned the school's NASA-funded Astrobiology Institute into a self-sustaining astrobiology program. There's no reason, many believe, why IU can't do the same. Pratt says there's some interest among the IUB faculty in establishing an astrobiology program. At the very least, Pratt, Basu, Bish, Schieber, and other IUB scientists hope to give interested students a way to learn more. "We hope to create an astrobiology minor with the help of the College of Arts and Sciences," Pratt explains. "The minor would be a concentration of courses, possibly involving faculty in biology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy."
The scientists have been meeting with College administrators and staff to determine whether there are enough lecturers to support an astrobiology minor, and how feasible the minor's administration would be.
University of California-Los Angeles professor Bruce Runnegar, who oversees IPTAI and 15 other "lead teams" as NASA Astrobiology Institute Director at Ames Research Center, says IU's efforts toward that end are laudable. "Astrobiology is an exciting business, so it attracts students to careers in science and technology," Runnegar says. "It is also a field that encourages and develops expertise in several disciplines. Courses and programs in astrobiology are bound to become more widespread as the field advances, both in the context of general education and in scientific and technical degree programs. Indiana University is leading the way in this regard."
LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
During the formation of solar system planets from giant rings of gas and dust, about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth seems to have gotten lucky. Our blue-brown globe is tepid and temperate, while our closest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, boil and freeze.
Venus is similar to Earth in size but follows an orbit closer to the sun. Hypothetically, Venus might have supported life, but it now seems rather unlikely that life can exist there. Under Venus' storm clouds, which completely enshroud the planet, it rains acid onto a volcanically active surface where temperatures top out around 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
Earth's other neighbor, Mars, is named after the Roman god of war, but is less violent, ironically, than Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty.
That isn't to say humankind's search for life on Mars is certain to turn up something. There are differences between Mars and life-friendly Earth, after all. For one, Mars is actually quite small — half as wide as Earth and just one-tenth as massive. A lower gravity exerted by the smaller planet means gases in Mars' atmosphere aren't held as tightly to its surface, so the planet's atmosphere isn't very thick. For another, the Martian atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, whereas Earth's atmosphere is dominated by diatomic nitrogen with some oxygen tossed in for good measure. It may be that Mars has always been too cold, too dry, or just too unlucky to have ever supported life.
A growing contingent of Mars scientists is optimistic, however. They believe where there is water, there can be life, and scientists agree there is water on Mars. If Bish's studies are predictive, water may even exist in a liquid-like state.
As any of IU's Mars scientists
will tell you, it is unclear at this
point whether the eventual answer to
Mars' life question is "yes" or "no."
But one thing, at least, seems certain:
IU scientists are poised to help deliver
the answer to us, once and for
all. 
David Bricker, MA’04, a freelance science writer in Bloomington, Ind., says he’s seen every Mars movie ever made — and prefers the bad ones.