鈥淪omeone called me up very early in the morning and said 鈥楬ey, would you like to help us out with this Mars rover business?鈥欌
Dr David Flannery has been asking big questions ever since he was little.聽
鈥淲hat's the deal with this planet? Why am I here? Where did humans come from?鈥澛
Science seemed to have the answers, leading him to do an undergraduate degree in geology and biology. Then the opportunity of a lifetime brought him to the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences to do a PhD.
鈥淎 grandfather of the field of astrobiology in Australia, Professor Malcolm Walter, offered me the chance to research some rocks in the desert, which preserve some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth.鈥
Just being at the NASA JPL was exciting. Within a short few years, one of the instruments he was working on, called PIXL, was selected to be used on the Mars 2020 mission.
These rocks, clocking in at between 2.5 and 4 billion years old, contain evidence of ancient microbes and their environments. But David鈥檚 research has implications beyond our own history. The more we learn about the conditions that supported early life on Earth, the better our chances of finding something similar elsewhere in the solar system.
David鈥檚 PhD taught him a lot about how to do good science, including always questioning one鈥檚 ideas and learning from one鈥檚 mistakes. He changed course after a year of hard work when he realised that his initial topic was 鈥減robably impossible鈥. This did not stop him from finishing his degree and becoming an expert in his field.
NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was keen to put this expertise to work as part of the Mars Exploration Program.
鈥淪omeone called me up very early in the morning and said 鈥楬ey, would you like to help us out with this Mars rover business?鈥 and I said, 鈥榊eah, sure鈥 without knowing where it was or how much they paid.鈥
Just being at the NASA JPL was exciting. Within a short few years, one of the instruments he was working on, called PIXL, was selected to be used on the Mars 2020 mission.
鈥淓verything just took off. We built a new lab and became deeply involved in the mission.鈥
PIXL was initially proposed by another Australian scientist, Dr Abigail Allwood. Along with the other instruments aboard the rover, it will search for evidence of ancient microbial life on the surface of Mars. PIXL is designed to detect chem