When it comes to a great deal, Virgin Mobile doesn't play around, introducing a new simplan price locked at fifteen euro month for life with unlimited data, calls and text and ninety nine percent coverage. Switch today at Virgin Media dot Ie Virgin Media It's playtime.
Tcnz s apply fifteen euro per month locked in while a Virgin Mobile customer twelve month contract include unlimited data, standard calls and text. All Iris Networks offer ends February eighteenth, twenty twenty six. See Virgin Media dote.
Do you know what real power is? It's knowing you're on the same rate for energy all day, every day with a smart all Day plan from board Gosh Energy. Save up to eight hundred and eighty euro on dual fuel plus get a two hundred and thirty five You're a welcome bonus switch today at board Goosh Energy dot Ie Board Gosh Energy. Know your Power.
Estimating annual ability twenty six hundred and twenty nine euro new customers only thirs percentI is kent of Smart all day electricity unit rates in twenty nine percent of gas unitrates. Sportcash Energy dot E for full secencies.
Oh Hi, welcome to smologies. What are smologies. Okay, So these are shorter, kid friendly versions of classic episodes. So we took them, and we took all the swears out, nothing too racy. You can listen around kids, you can listen around your grandparents, perhaps, work colleagues, whatever. If you want the full length version of this episode, though, of course, it's going to be linked in the show notes. We
also have more smologies up at aliwar dot com slash smologies. Okay, enjoy, Hey, it's your stepbrother's girlfriend, the one with the pet rat? What's up at sali ward? Welcome back another episode of ologies?
Are you ready?
Okay? Mars so that that orange orb in the night sky. It's fodder for science fiction and it's a place where billionaires ask themselves, can we go there when we ruin the planet?
Or on?
So, maybe you love Mars. Maybe you don't know why people love Mars. Maybe you're like me, and until a few years ago, I would think, wait, is Mars a really hot hot like fiery one? Because it's red and stuff? I had no idea. Okay, areology. Let's get into it. So first off, Mars has a lot of iron in the oil, which makes it red, which makes it look like the Solar System's big bloody eyeball. So hence we
named it after the god of war, Mars. So it's Aris in Greek mythology, and if you want to know more about Roman's ripping off Greeks, listen to the mythology episode. So the word areology means study of Mars. So this ologist was introduced to me via email by my NASA friend Casey. Hi, Casey Hi. Christine. Casey's email between us simply said, do you need introductions? No, you do not. Then I received a message back from her saying that she listens to the podcast. So this interview was on.
It was happening. So I got off a plane from a work trip. I had it straight from the airport to a little conference room with squeaky chairs at Caltech in Pasadena to talk about like what Mars deal is? Why is it cold? Why was it named after the deity of battle? What's up with its two moons, one named after the fear and the other of the dread that a company wore, some super recent discoveries about life,
insane dust storms. The rovers are building, so please prepare for a journey into space, and you're rocky subconscious with areologist Jennifer Booze alogy knowlogy knowli So you study Mars, Yes you're an areologist?
Yes? Is that correct?
Yeah?
Well I think I'm a planetary geologist who studies Mars. But I study Mars.
I'm an areologist as a planetary geologist. Can you run me through, Like, what's Mars? What's it steal? Why is it so dry? How cold is it? How big is it? Just tell me what we're working with here, Give me some specs, Like if you were if you were a dog, and you're like, I don't know what Mars is, like, how would you start?
Okay, So Mars, you know, it's the next planet from our sun, so it's going to be like older. It's also a lot smaller.
At its closest, Mars is around thirty four million miles that's fifty five million kilometers, So scale wise, Mars is about half the size of Earth and has roughly one third the gravity one third. So I looked up a few simulators of Mars gravity and in one there's this human in an orange onesie supported by slings, taking these graceful leaps around an indoor track, kind of like a
giant Marionette. In another video, I saw what appeared to be a gaggle of French cosmonautical tourists taking a ride in a Vomit Comet, which is a seatless commercial jet that makes these roller coaster dips in flights and simulates lower gravity. I don't know from what I can tell, less gravity looks fun with these middle aged Parisians resorting to whoops, they're hooting like tiny happy donkeys, our kids in a ball pit. Ah, So, Mars gravity, take your weight,
divide it by three. That is your bounding happy space pony weight.
It's like, atmosphere is super thin right now, but in the past it had a thicker atmosphere and there was water on it for sure, like we have evidence for like streams and lakes and all sorts of like things like that. And it was a lot warmer because it had an atmosphere, and it used to have a magnetic field like we had on Earth, but it doesn't have one anymore. How do magnetic fields die Mars? Because it's smaller,
it kind of like cooled down a lot quicker. On Earth, it's like hot down in our core and we have got iron spinning around and it's also like a big plan but Mars doesn't have like all those things, and so it's core is like just not putting out that kind of motion anymore. So we're not getting a magnet field anymore.
I had no idea that was even a thing. I didn't know that was an option. Yeah, does Mars have moons? It has two moons, Phobos and Demos. Okay, there's like some debate about.
How the Moon's formed, but I think most people think they're like captured asteroids. So they're really small moons and not like ours, and I think from the surface they look more like a planet's.
So if you're on Mars, yeah, do you see two moons in the sky at the same time.
I think you can, but they're so small, I think that they look more like planets.
Okay, they just are like little Dimi dots.
Yeah, I don't think they don't look like Arman for sure.
Okay, Yeah, I thought maybe have you ever cracked an
egg and you got a double yoak an e? As for Mars's double moons, some hot goss Jennifer emailed me that Phobos, which she described as a twenty six kilometer wide, lumpy cocoa puff may not have been a captured asteroid, but possibly it was formed out of a cloud of dust that was left over from a giant impact, kind of like our own beloved moon, and that possibly possibly Phobos has formed many times over Mars history, and it just periodically crashes into the surface, forms a dust cloud
around Mars again, and then recreates itself into a moon, and then crashes again, forms itself anew again, but smaller, over and over and over. So what do they think happened to make Mars such a dust bowl?
So it got dry. Basically it used to have water, but because it's so much smaller, its atmosphere like got lost basically doesn't have as much gravity like pulling it in.
And it also like didn't have a magnetic field anymore, and like we say, our magnet field protects us, and so like the atmosphere just got like stripped away over time by like the solar wind and other atmosphere loss processes, and so it just lost its atmosphere got drier and drier, and then now it has a thin atmosphere and everything's just dusty.
Does the water evaporate into the solar system?
Yeah, it just gets like lost and yeah, basically I wonder where it goes. Yeah, I don't know, just like out there.
Can ition just oceans just kind of missing around.
Maybe I think it's like probably really scattered apart. Okay, probably just a gas.
So we have a super dusty planet.
Yeah, why is it red? It has a lot of iron. It's like rusty.
Oh yeah, and same as like Utah.
Yeah yeah, kind of a lot of ways.
So what parts of this chili desert are we really poking around? Now? The Curiosity rover landed in a crater, Gale Crater named for Walter Frederick Gael, who was an Australian banker by name, but he was a real space do we bind? So? Gale Crater is this huge dent in Mars, and it's filled with a mountain of perhaps wind whipped debrize that's taller than Mount Rainier. It looks like if you piled a bunch of brown sugar into a shallow bowl, or like a little tiny tuft of
lint in a belly button. Now, why do we care about this crater? Because maybe it was a lake?
Why did we.
Put Curiosity in the crater that's where the lake was? Okay, And that's where the cool stuff was got it. So if there were gonna be like signs that people had a party there, we would find it in the bottom of what used to be lake, or we'd be like, there were maybe some old.
Fish in here. Yeah, okay, yeah, it's like a basin, so stuff's gonna collect there. And we had seen from orbit that there were like layers that looked like they could have been from a lake or something wet or people actually really debated what the layers were and so it's just people were curious from many different perspectives, and so that's why we went there. But picking like the landing site is like a multi year thing with like hundreds of people involved and stuff.
So what's the twenty twenty get a peep? What's it looking at? Where's it gonna land? So we don't know yet where it's gonna land. It's like down to three sites. Okay, now, according to a page up at marsnext dot JPL dot NASA dot gov. I'll put a link in the show notes all possible sites where life could have existed and or there's a lot of evidence for rocks and fluids having interacted.
And so one of the big ideas behind like past Mars life is that that it was like microbes maybe living in like cracks and rocks and stuff, and so there's also in that area there's also like volcanism and a wide variety of rocks there and a wide variety of ages, which is crucial because Mars was like probably habitable in its like early history.
How long ago do you think Mars was probably habitable? Right? Are we talking like five billion years ago or like thirty thousand billion years?
No long time ago? Okay, billions of years, Okay, just billion years or something like. I mean maybe there's like still some fluid activity more recently, but it's like such small amounts that these would be like really lonely bugs. There's a big group of people that want to send a rover back to the same spot where Spirit is, which is kind of a cute thought in some way.
A lot of people are like, no, we want to go somewhere new, but that spot there's like hydrothermal activity, so which is like on Earth where a lot of people think life might have started here. So that's why there's big arguments to go back there.
To make primordial Martian soup. Yeah, kind of how much water is on Mars and when did we find it? I say we as though I had anything to do with it.
Currently on Mars there's not a lot of water. There's like some water, like liquid water, just like in pores of rocks and like buried basically not really exposed on the surface. But there's like water ice in the caps.
And when did we find it? I think think probably the best, Like when we started getting these early images that showed like channels, there was no solid evidence that it was formed by water, but people were like, the looks like it was formed by water, and then you know, get more and more info on it.
Yeah, So what happened with the recent announcement, Like everyone, watch out, we have an announcement to make about Mars, and everyone's like, I'm setting my alarm clock, I'm staying up late. Yeah, what happened with that announcement?
So there were what people call like the building blocks of life that were found with the Curiosity rover. These like molecules that are actually really hard to preserve. They were found by the rover pretty like fresh looking, and so they're I don't know, it's just like the building blocks of life that were found and we didn't think that we would find them because they can get destroyed
really easily. So that means that they were like resurfaced like pretty recently, which is really exciting, and that they were there at all was exciting that they could have formed.
And so this was a heads up. We have the ingredients to make life. We didn't find it yet, but we found the ingredients. Ye, and that's a big deal. Yeah, I have one million questions for you. Okay, is it okay if I ask you one million?
Yeah? Okay.
But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to aliword dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've given to already, with more
every single week. So if you need a place to go donate a little bit of money but you're not sure where to go, those are all picked biologists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton.
Of money to them.
So thanks for listening and thank sponsors.
When it comes to a great deal.
Virgin Mobile doesn't play around introducing our new simplan price locked at fifteen euro month for life with unlimited data, calls and text and ninety nine percent coverage. Switch today at Virgin Media dot Ie Virgin Media it's playtime.
TCNZ supply fifteen you're per month locked in while a Virgin Mobile customer twelve month contract include unlimited data, standard calls and text. All Irish networks offer ends Februar eighteenth, twenty twenty six. See Virgin Media dote.
Do you know what real power is? It's knowing you're on the same rate for energy all day, every day with a smart all Day plan from board Gosh Energy. Save up to eight hundred and eighty euro on dual fuel plus get a two hundred and thirty five eure a welcome bonus switch today at board Goosh Energy dot I e Board Gosh Energy. Know your Power.
Estimating Annuel bill A twenty six hundred and twenty nine your new customers only thirst percentI is kent of Smart all day electricity unit rates in twenty nine percent of gas US Sportcash Energy dot E for full SEESNCS.
Okay, your questions, Greg ariel Belk, Craig Curry, and Jorge Barnett all ask the same basic question. So this is a super question, Okay, in light of the giant ust storm that seems to have knocked out the curiosity, what is the most useful to humanity right now information that it has collected since its arrival to the red planet? So what's the best stuff that the rovers have gotten?
Okay? So, like I was thinking about this a lot, and I think the seeing that Mars was habitable in the past was probably the most interesting and maybe useful to humanity kind of thing because we see how Mars has changed with time, and like how Earth might change with time to and also like what the different extremes like that we can have on different planets are. So that's like super interesting.
Mariner Cosplay, Al Martinez, Irakasha, Stephen Titus, and Justin M. Gifford all wanted to know what are the biggest hurdles for terraforming and is there an initiative within NASA or another agency to do so? Also follow up question from Ali Ward, what is terror?
I think terraforming. I don't know the definition, but I feel like it's when you make the surface like have grass on it. Really no, no, definitely not. That's just what I imagine is Like what.
Terraforming is landscaping, it's partial landscaping. Yeah, uh, you'll have to look that up. But so quick definition here. Terraforming is mostly at present a sci fi term, and it means to transform a planet to be more like Earth, presumably so that we can go live there. So I imagine in the future HGTV will have a whole flip or Flop esque series dedicated to making over dry, barren planets
into like lush, boho habitats of our dreams. All we have to do is just painstakingly alter but already naturally exists.
Can you review the question?
Yeah, essentially, what are the biggest hurdles for terraforming?
Okay, so, yeah, that we don't have a lot of water or oxygen in the atmosphere, or that the amr so thin in general, So it's either going to have to be like you make the atmosphere thicker somehow by like melting the caps or like taking an atmosphere. But then you need a shield for the atmosphere.
So, like I think if they.
Existed in bubbles, like if we had like a big dome, maybe you could kind of start doing that that way, where you can like contain your atmosphere and your water and stuff like that. Yeah, so those are the big hurdles. In Radiation is another hurdle.
Because there's not a lot of atmosphere to shieldy from it exactly. Even though the sun is farther away, you're still like sizzling. So even if you landscape Mars, you're still going to get a pretty high dose of radiation because of a really thin atmosphere. And also the place is pretty dry, it's pretty sandy. Now there is water trapped in minerals, but getting it out would be, in technical terms, a ton of work. Christopher Barley had a
great question that I didn't even I hadn't considered. He says, I seem to remember that the northern half of is completely smooth, while the southern half is full of craters. Yeah, what's up? Do we understand what caused this and why the inconsistency?
Yeah, So, like, uh, I think that maybe the major idea for this is that there was a big impact that came in like at an oblique angle and just like shaved off the top of Mars, and then it was like low And there's also a lot of debate about the they're called the Northern Lowlands the Southern Highlands, and so like the Southern Highlands are like way older, and there's like what we think were like catastrophic floods
going up there. So is there some idea that there was an ocean up there too, which may explain that, and then like volcanism related to that like impact, so all things that could have smoothed it out.
Oh my gosh. Katherine Woodrow and Michelle Sullivan both asked about microbia life on Mars. Which type of bacteria do you think would be the most likely to be found? Michelle Sullivan was like, cinobacteria, Yeah, so like extremophiles.
I think for sure, I couldn't like tell you a specific bacteria, but like extremo files are things that live in extreme places, and so I think that's what we could find there. And I think there are some ciano bacteria that fit that category. And then like these microfossils that they thought were in this meteorite, those were magnetotactic bacteria. So if it were true that that were that they
were fossils and maybe we could find that there. And since Mars did have a magnetic feel, it's not totally out of the question that they could have used it. Interesting. Yeah, and there's a lot of iron theres that's another possibility.
Jude kidding wants to know what color is the sky on Mars. Are there long sunsets or does it switch to dark quickly? And can you see Earth from Mars?
Okay, so the color of Mars, the color of the sky on Mars is like a butter scotch color, yeah, which we know, like from taking pictures and stuff of Mars. So there's a lot of like dust in the atmosphere, so it's dimmer. It's like way further from the sun than Earth is, so it's dimmer. But there it's still sunlight, but it's just darker. And so you think, and the days are about the same length, so I guess in a way it gets darker quicker, but only because there's
less of light to begin with. Maybe, Yeah, But then the dust interacts with the atmosphere in the sunlight differently than it does on Earth because it's just like super iron rich dust, and so I think that's why it's like a more butter Scotch color than here we have like this blue color.
What is one thing about Mars that people don't know that would really flabbergas them.
Just how wet it used to be? People often ask me like, is it true that we found water on Mars? And then like, yeah, we found that like a million times already. Like, but that's the thing that they're often blown away by, right, But I think it's just still, for some reason not common knowledge yet that Mars used to be this like awesome place that was like not as cold and dry as it is now it's like wet.
Just lush pools and spaws.
Yeah maybe maybe slimy maybe Well I was just thinking, like you said, the lush, and I thought of like plants, but like in actually, if there's any life there would probably be like micro says like slimy.
Yeah that's okay too. What's your favorite thing about Mars or your job surrounding Mars?
I love that I can be paid to think about another planet and what it used to be like and what we could have been like and just these like crazy questions that are you know, really removed from the day to day, but that like that's my job, like because I could have a really practical job, but I instead get to do this really out out of this world thing.
Literally.
Yeah, and it's like a really cool to be part of these teams.
And any advice to anyone who's like I want to work on Marsh.
Yeah, there's so many ways to get involved with Mars stuff. And like one great thing about NASA is that all of our data that we get is publicly available. You can anybody with the internet can go on the Internet and look at like dope pictures of Mars for free download data the rover guts, Like anybody can have the same data that the scientists who work at NASA have. So you can literally just become you can just do that on your own, and you can go to like
seminars and stuff and meet people and read books. Like there's tons of podcasts and stuff like that. There's like a million ways to get involved with NASA stuff, and there's lots of NASA outreach that is like pretty accessible, I think to most people. Thank you so much for being on Thank you, I'm so excited. Thanks for caring about Mars.
Dude, I do care about Mars. I love Mars even more now great it works, So there you have it. I am so much more about Mars than I was before meeting the amazing doctor Jennifer Booze and her website What a destination on this world wide web. It features self portraits of her as a turtle with octopus hair. It's gorgeously perfect. It's j nnfr dot bz so it's her name novals Now. You can find ologies at Ologies
on Instagram or Twitter. I'm on both at Ali Ward with one L and if you want more smologies you can find them at aliward dot com slash smologies. There are tons of episodes. They're all kids, safe, classrooms, safe with experts. We are at ologies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Aliward with one L on both. Thank you Zeegredrigez, Thomas Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media, and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for working on these. We like to keep these small and short, so you'll find a whole
list of credits in the show notes. Thank you for listening and pass them on. Okay, Bryebye Ologies, Spology, algy.
Ologyologies when it comes to a great deal.
Virgin Mobile doesn't play around introducing our news simplan price locked at fifteen year a month for life, with unlimited data, calls and texts and ninety nine percent coverage. Switch today at Virginmedia dot Ie. Virgin Media It's playtime.
TCNC supply fifteen europer month locked in, while a Virgin Mobile customer twelvemonth contract includes unlimited data, standard calls and texts to all Irish networks. Offer ends Februar eighteenth, twenty twenty six. See Virgin Media dot Ie