Testing tools for Mars on Earth: an interview with Dr. Heldmann

November 13, 2015

In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix lander struck ice in the northern arctic regions of Mars. This discovery had exciting implications for Mars’ past, present, and future habitability, since where there’s water, there may be life.

NASA has been developing new tools to drill deep into Mars’ ice layers and extract subterranean samples for scientific analysis. One of these early prototypes, called IceBreaker, was designed to perform all these tasks in Mars’ harsh landscape. However, before the drill could be sent to Mars, it needed to be tested on Earth.

To test out the drill under Mars-like conditions, scientists had to find a region on Earth that resembled Mars. This would require finding a Mars analog with a surface made of the same dry, frozen soil-over-ice layers found on the Red Planet. This kind of terrain, called permafrost, never reaches temperatures above freezing, and it is extremely rare on Earth.

Fortunately, NASA’s scientists found just what they were looking for at University Valley, in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. Temperatures in the valley are about 8 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, so the subsurface ice never melts.

In 2009, NASA sent a team of six researchers, collectively called the IceBite Team, to University Valley to test the IceBreaker drill. Heather D’Angelo, for NOW.SPACE spoke with one of the researchers, Dr. Jen Heldmann, about her experience working in this harsh environment and her hopes for future Mars missions.

Heather D’Angelo: Describe a typical day working in Antarctica.

Jen Heldmann: You wake up in your tent, which is minus 10 or 20 degrees inside, so you have to learn good mechanisms for keeping yourself warm in there. It’s a little counterintuitive because, at first, you think you should wear your big jacket to bed, but you actually just want to wear regular clothes to bed and have a little air around you to keep you warm. If you wear your heavy-duty stuff to bed, you’ll freeze.

After you wake up, you quickly put some warm gear on, then get out of your little tent and go to the big kitchen tent to get something (maybe) warm to eat. Then you go to the bathroom (which is a bucket!), get your science gear ready, and go out to do science all day.

HD: Those sound like really challenging conditions. How long would you work outside each day?

JH: We’d be out there all day because we were just going back to tents at the end of the day—it’s not like we were going back to a warm building. And there was always so much to do. It’s the most scientifically rich field site I’ve ever been to. Everything is new, different, and unexplored. There were always serendipitous discoveries–finding new things to explore and things to go back and look at. We would be out all day, then regroup for dinner in the kitchen tent (alternating who did the cooking every night), and then we’d have a science discussion over dinner. Usually, after dinner, we would keep talking, write up our notes, look at our samples, or run some quick experiments.

HD: You’ve mentioned quite a lot of stuff—tents, equipment, etc., on-site. How did you bring it all to such a remote location?

JH: Everything we needed for those several weeks had to be put on a helicopter and brought in—all of our science gear, all of our instruments, all of our personal gear, like tents and sleeping bags, all of our food, the fuel—everything. The nice thing is that you don’t need a freezer in Antarctica—you can just leave your food outside. It’s a lot of logistics ahead of time. It’s not trivial. I’m still amazed that we do this every year!

HD: Why is ice such a critical area of research concerning Mars missions?

JH: We can use the water in the ice for many things, for instance, rocket fuel. We have to know how deep the ice is on Mars to know how deep we have to dig. Is it right near the surface? Can we just scrape the dirt away, and there it is? Do you have to dig really deep?

HD: Where do you think the best place on Mars is for human settlements?

JH: There’s a balance between wanting to be at a low enough latitude—closer to the equator where the temperatures aren’t as bad, and you have a lot of solar energy for solar power—with wanting to be where there’s ice near the surface. So that pushes you to the higher latitudes because it’s colder as you get to the poles. That’s where you’ve got the ice. So you want to go somewhere in the middle and find that sweet spot where you can have enough solar energy and a good enough thermal environment where the temperatures aren’t too cold and extreme. But you also need near-surface ice to access because that’s going to be an important resource to enable long-term settlement.

HD: Do you think humans will colonize Mars one day?

JH: I hope we do. We should be able to. We have the know-how. We have the gumption. I used to want to live on Mars, but now I’m older, and I have children. My daughter already told me that she doesn’t want to fly in space, and she’s four, so I’ve got my answer.

HD: That’s funny—maybe one day she’ll change her mind. Besides colonizing Mars, what other discoveries and innovations do you hope for?

JH: I hope that we can arrive at a definitive answer about if there is life beyond the Earth one day. There are a few interesting places to look at—Mars, Europa, Enceladus. We’re getting tantalizingly close, and we keep taking little steps towards it. We’re looking at habitability, looking for water, looking for ancient life—but is there life today? Are we alone in the universe? Hopefully, we can send a mission that can address this question because it has such huge implications—not only for science but for our society and our philosophy. It’s the most fundamental question, and now we have the scientific tools available to answer it.

If we answer that question, we can start understanding the distribution of life in the universe. Right now, we only have one data point now—that’s Earth life. And it’s hard to draw a lot of trends from one data point. So if we could even get one more data point, we could try and understand if there is life elsewhere, then what is it like? Is it like us? Or is it completely different, with a different origin and evolution? Is life rampant throughout the universe? Or are we it?