NASA in Silicon Valley: Mary Beth Wilhelm
A conversation with Mary Beth Wilhelm, NASA research scientist in the Planetary Science Branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
Transcript
Matthew C. Buffington (Host): You’re listening to NASA in Silicon Valley, a conversational podcast series from NASA’s Ames Research Center to chat with the various scientists, researchers, engineers and all-around cool people at NASA.
If you check out nasa.gov/ames, we have a handful of cool stories for you. First, NASA’s Kepler just confirmed over 100 exoplanets during its K2 mission. We have another story up about using 3-D simulations and a NASA supercomputer to better understand the origin of stars. Finally we have a new story, in collaboration with the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Earth Science team on NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography, or ATom, mission which is a flying laboratory that is the first to survey the atmosphere over the oceans.
Well, today’s guest is NASA research scientist Mary Beth Wilhelm. Mary Beth works on NASA’s journey to Mars in the Planetary Science Branch at Ames. We talk about why that journey is worth the risks, and also how we can answer some of humanity’s fundamental questions about life beyond Earth. And of course we talk about how she got into NASA and her interesting trips to various deserts throughout the world to help study Mars. Here we go.
Host: Yeah, it’s cool. We’ve needed to touch base for a while.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: I know. So, I submitted my big paper to a journal.
Host: Really, cool. We need to go back on MarsFest, let alone water on Mars. So, it’s been a while, all Mars things that Mary Beth does. For anybody who doesn’t know you, you can circle back to the beginning of what brought you to Silicon Valley in general, but then also how you got into NASA. Kind of a little intro thing.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: So yeah, I actually grew up in the Bay Area, so I didn’t realize this was a weird place to live, or to be, until I realized I wanted to do my bachelor’s on the east coast at Cornell University. And I realized within three weeks, after running out of my winter clothes, that I came from a pretty good place.
Host: The Bay Area seems nice after you get a taste of some good old northeastern winter.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Exactly, but I did my high school in Mountain View, so I was surrounded by the children of all the Google-ites and all the Silicon Valley-ites.
Host: It must’ve came up while you were growing up, it became.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It didn’t seem like a weird thing until I went away.
Host: And then came back. And how did that end up leveraging into NASA?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, so I was lucky to have a NASA center just down the street, and I loved space and exploration since I could breathe. Ever since I was a kid, I was really into Mars and into geology. My first-grade science experiment was actually about planetary science, and that’s what I’m doing my Ph.D. in right now. So, it’s always been on this trajectory. And when I turned 16, I had a friend of a friend of a friend who worked at NASA, and he got me a summer job.
Host: Like an internship?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: I was actually working as an admin, copy machine, fax machine, entering things in Excel sheets. But I met some of the other folks that worked here, and they had a lot of projects that they needed an extra hand on, so I got hired on while in high school to work part-time at NASA, and the rest is history.
Host: I think of all the part-time jobs to have as a high schooler.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It was pretty incredible.
Host: I worked at an ice cream shop, you worked at NASA.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: But it was amazing. I always felt really at home here, and I’ve always credited those women who hired me on so young for giving me a leg up on the competition and setting my career on this trajectory. So, yeah.
Host: That’s pretty cool. I remember the first time I saw you, it was during the whole Mars, the water on Mars, the big announcement that came in last year. And you’re actually a co-author on that, right?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, I’m the second author on that paper.
Host: So, if I understand it correctly, it’s coming down to like, really salty water that probably… previously you didn’t think could exist on Mars, considering how cold it is, but since it’s a brine, you saw — go into a little bit of what was . . .
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Sure. So, NASA’s always had this fixation, looking for water on Mars. And in the past, it’s more been focused on looking for signs of ancient water. There’s all this evidence for maybe ancient shorelines and valley networks, and all these things that point to a lot of water that used to exist on the surface. But for Mars’ recent history, it’s been pretty dry. It’s been a dry, dusty desert.
Just a couple years ago, the first author on the paper, he made this observation of these features, these geologic features that were appearing during springtime and summertime months on the sides of slopes and on the sides of craters. And they named them recurring slope lineae — just these features that would appear and then disappear.
Host: Okay, and this is from the satellites going around Mars, they’re taking pictures and you’re comparing them.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, so they were looking at high-resolution images. So then, the student then, he actually made this discovery as an undergraduate. He went on to graduate school at Georgia Tech, where I’m currently doing my Ph.D. as well. And he started looking into other data sets that are onboard this satellite, trying to see if he could deduce any chemical information.
So, I was there the day he was looking at the data that had just come down from the satellites and had seen this weird signature, and it was right over these weird features, these recurring slope lineae, and it came back with a signal. And he was like, what is this, does it look like water? And I was the first one to point out maybe, the hypothesis that it was actually a salty water mixture.
Host: A brine, I guess?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: A brine, and that’s what it turned out to be. So, by having the salt in there, it makes the liquid water actually stable on the present-day surface of Mars, where it’s too cold, the pressure’s too cold to support liquid water. This is sort of the magic trick.
Host: It’s not like the liquid water, not like our oceans that are salty. This is super salty. So, it’s so salty that it doesn’t freeze, basically.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Or evaporate away immediately.
Host: How does that reoccurrence happen?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It’s still sort of a mystery. We don’t know the source of the water. That’s still one of the big mysteries out there. One of the major hypotheses now is that it’s forming by this process called deliquescence. So, salts have this ability to pull water out of the atmosphere. So, the water goes from vapor form to liquid form. So, the idea is that there’s some sort of concentration of these salts, and then it concentrates the water and forms into a liquid and then flows down the surface.
But, still super controversial, and there’s a lot of other hypotheses explaining how these features might be forming.
Host: That’s crazy. And so, from the moment when you noticed this difference into then that turns into a paper, it turns into an announcement, things get verified — it’s got to be a whole process.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It was a year-long process from discovery to the announcement.
Host: To the announcement.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: And we definitely did our homework and went through all the major players on the team that controlled the satellite, and that had a really good understanding of the satellite data before we put the information out there and got it vetted by other people. Wrote a paper, submitted the paper to a scientific journal, where it then goes through another peer review process before it can get published, and then came the time to tell everybody else about it.
Host: Cool. Yeah, everything everybody remembers when the announcement came out, around the same time as the movie.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It was totally a coincidence.
Host: So, how many people ask you about the movie, The Martian?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It was funny. It happened to be, the week the embargo on our paper was released was the same week as The Martian. And I had reporters ask me . . .
Host: Was it planned?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Was it planned? And like no, absolutely not. We had been working on that paper for a year. It just happened. It was truly a coincidence.
Host: That would take a lot of complicated planning to try to plan it out with their shooting schedule.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: I don’t think even if we tried, we could’ve done it.
Host: It was just a happenstance.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It just happened to be. But it was cool, because Matt Damon actually toasted us with water on I forget, one of the talk shows.
Host: Was it really salty water, brine?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: I hope so.
Host: That’s funny. Okay, so you go through, you have this big announcement, what’s the next step? Are you just looking for another crazy discovery, or do you kind of build on what you already discovered?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, so my interest is more in lines of looking for evidence of life. Why do we care about water on Mars? Some people care because water is a good potential resource for future explorers of the red planet, but my interest lies more with the potential for life having formed, or still existing.
Host: Like microbial, even.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Exactly. So, when we talk about looking for life on Mars, we’re not talking about little green men. We’re talking about tiny little microscopic organisms that may have developed on Mars a long time ago. So, something that maybe not many people know is that Mars used to be a lot more earth-like.
Four billion years ago, it had liquid water, it had a thicker atmosphere. It had all the ingredients that earth did to start life. All the delivery of organic compounds by comets and meteorites. So the question is, did life ever develop there, and if it did, can we find evidence of it, or does it still exist today? These are the questions that drive my research here at NASA.
Host: Wow. So then, we had mentioned MarsFest. It’s the Mars Comic-Con, I guess, Mars Con, because this is an annual thing that a bunch of researchers and scientists go in the middle of the desert. I was very sad that I wasn’t able to go, but what is that like?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, so a month ago I went to this thing called the MarsFest in Death Valley, and it was a celebration of analogue research. Meaning, using sites on earth, understanding some property about them, and then applying that knowledge to Mars. So, I’m someone that definitely has used deserts on earth to understand more about Mars. So, it was a bunch of researchers doing that kind of thing to come together, give talks to the public, and get others excited about planetary science and exploration. So, that was Death Valley.
Host: It’s cool. Everybody thinks of Mars and the SLS rocket, building these rockets, how do we get there, how do we send rovers there, but it’s like, so much has to happen on that journey to Mars. These scientific discoveries, and things that help lead that path.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, science is so incremental. The things that hit the press are usually the work of hundreds of people doing their little puzzle piece, and then suddenly the last piece gets put in and you can see the bigger picture. That’s maybe more of what the media does, reporting on the big leaps and the big strides forward, but it stands on the backs of all the other people who laid the groundwork.
Host: Little small discoveries that are stacked upon each other, and you’re fortunate to put your little piece on top.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Science is about getting excited about the minutia, and maybe every once in a while you get lucky and you make a big step.
Host: Incrementalism, yeah. There’s a lot of work going on. What is the work that excites you that you don’t necessarily have your hands in, but you get to watch it from the side? So, it’s not necessarily your research, but other stuff you get to see.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Oh gosh, that’s a hard question. I think there’s a lot of really cool research going on here at NASA Ames. Definitely, there’s a lot of folks that do interesting work studying the different processes going on, on Titan, which is a moon of Saturn, and has beaches made out of organics, which totally fascinates me, because we are looking so hard to find organics on Mars. Organics are just carbon compounds, and are part of the essential ingredients for life. And we’re working really hard to try to make those discoveries and try to understand, you know, even finding a handful of carbon compounds on Mars.
Meanwhile on Titan, they have lakes made out of carbon and beaches made out of carbon and it has weather systems. I find that whole system really fascinating.
So, there’s people that work in the lab, and they create Titan’s atmosphere in the lab, or they’ll create properties of Titan in the lab. I think that stuff’s really cool. I’ve never worked on that, though. I’m more of a Martian.
Host: More than Martian. So, what do you see? We talked a little bit about some of the research you’re working on now — so, if we talk a year from now, where do you think the direction’s going?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: Yeah, so my research now, I’ve been doing a lot of work in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It is such an extraordinary place. It is the driest place in the world, the site I work at.
Host: It’s not just hyperbole.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: No, it is the driest place in the world. It gets about two millimeters of rain per decade, and when it rains, it doesn’t even saturate the surface, it hits the ground and then just evaporates. And so last time, I was out there in February for a month camping, doing some research, and we came across these kind of mud flats, and you could see, it looks like a cratered surface like the moon, but they were actually the imprints of the rain that happened there a decade ago.
It’s hard to describe to someone how dry it is who’s never been there. I can count the number of plants I saw on one hand, during the month. So, there’s no plants, there’s no animals, there’s no lichens. There’s not even really any evidence for microbes surviving in the soil. It’s just basically, you find these organisms that were blown around by the wind and then deposited, and then just accumulated. So, all the dead bodies sort of piling up.
So, it’s a really Martian place. And then, the crazy place to me is that the site is still 1,000 times wetter than the surface of Mars. And so, you kind of get that perspective. And then, going to the Mojave, the Mojave is 100 times wetter than the Atacama, so it’s like a forest in comparison. It’s hard to believe that much life can survive somewhere in a desert environment.
So, my angle with it is, I use the Atacama to understand how the remnants of life get preserved in the fossil record. So, I’m looking at million-year-old soils that have been completely dry since they were deposited, and I’m trying to understand how the remnants of life get preserved in that record, and thereby trying to understand what we might look for on Mars, what chemical state would we expect it to be in, what kind of changes does it undergo in the rock record over that time period under those conditions?
And the cool thing to me, what I found in my research is that because it’s so dry and so salty, it’s like mummified. It doesn’t degrade. So, we’re looking at these chemicals from microorganisms that lived a few million years ago, completely intact.
Host: Completely intact, wow. So obviously, if you go down there with a group, it makes sense that you can visit a place like this, through your experience, or even running some sort of run-throughs or demonstrations, lessons learned to then build into what you could possibly do in Mars.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: I went down with a group that also is out of NASA Ames here, that is actually building a robot that has a drill, and they’re testing the drilling system and a suite of instruments with collaborators at Goddard Space Flight Center and with some folks in Spain and at JPL in Pasadena to integrate and test this payload with a drilling system.
So, I was on the science team, and I was out in my science land trying to understand things about the Atacama, but then feeding that into the engineers and their designs of their systems. So, it was actually a really great experience, integration of the science and tech here at Ames.
Host: Wow, cool. So, going back to when you first came here, even anybody else that’s interested in eventually wanting to join NASA, it sounds very exciting going to Chile and going to these different places, but what is your day-to-day, a day in the life of Mary Beth, NASA researcher and scientist?
Mary Beth Wilhelm: It involves at least five coffees. No, my work, I’m lucky that my work is very varied. So, I’ll go to Chile for a month and I’ll camp and I’ll rough it, I’ll collect a lot of samples, return them, and then I’ll spend a month in the lab. And I love lab work.
It’s great because it’s like your own little universe you get to create and have control over and do experiments or test things and analyze things. So, I’ll spend a lot of time in the lab. It’s a lot like cooking, where you’re preparing something and then mixing it with something else, and then you’re heating it up, and then eventually you run it on a suite of instruments that returns information on it.
Typically, I use a system called a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. So, a really fancy term, and actually it sounds really scary, but they talk about it on CSI all the time, so I feel like this is totally fair game to talk about.
Basically what I do is, I take my soils, I’ll extract all the biomarkers out of them that I’m interested in studying, and I’ll concentrate them to a very small volume. And I take that mixture of organics I’ve collected, and I’ll inject them onto my gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, or GCMS. And basically what it does is it separates out the compounds and then it runs them through a mass spectrometer, which takes an individual organic and it’ll fragment it.
And it returns basically a fragmentation pattern, which is a fingerprint, and allows me to identify exactly what the compound is. So, through that process then, I accumulate a lot of data, and then I’ll spend months analyzing that data, figuring out the identity of the organics, and then putting that into the story, going back to thinking about the Atacama and the field site. How does this connect to the geological environment, and trying to fit it into a broader story about the history of that site.
Host: This is fascinating.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: So computers, laboratory, field science, that’s what I love about planetary science. I do not have one singular job, I have many jobs.
Host: You kind of have to have different hats. It’s also cool working also with the other, not only the other NASA centers, but other researchers, other academic institutions.
Mary Beth Wilhelm: And this is, my favorite thing about Ames is how collaborative everybody is. The culture here is so distinctive, because not only are we in the middle of Silicon Valley, you have access to amazing top of the line technology, but also everybody’s really relaxed about it and willing to collaborate. It has that sort of California mentality, and I love the marriage of those two different things. It makes it a great place to work and to do research.
And Ames has historically been a think tank center, and I think in the future it’ll continue to have that sort of academic setting, but I think folks around here are also really interested in getting more involved with mission work and developing instruments and payloads we can send to other places to investigate these questions we’re so interested in.
Host: Cool, thank you so much for coming on out. Remember folks, you can always reach us on NASA’s Ames Research Center on Facebook page, and also on Twitter @NASAAMES, using the #NASASiliconValley. We would love to get feedback or questions on this episode, or any future guests or topics you’d like to hear about.
But thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week on NASA on Silicon Valley.