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The New England
Chapter of
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The Explorers Club
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"The explorer is the poet of action and exploring is the poetry of deeds."
--VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
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The next meeting of the New England Chapter of The Explorers Club will be on Tuesday, June 1, 2004
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Harvard Professor and a member of the Mars Exploration Rover science team, Andy Knoll looks for signs of life in rocks, but what makes him different than his fellow paleontologists is that the rocks he looks at are very old and some of them are out of this world. Dr. Knoll has graciously accepted an invitation from the New England Chapter of The Explorers Club to wrap up our 2003-2004 speakers season with a presentation on the current status of the Mars Rover project. The meeting will be held at 7:00 on Tuesday, June 1 at the Doubletree Guest Suites in Allston.
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When life first appeared on earth it left few traces of its existence. Microfossils of the earliest bacteria in nearly 2 billion-year-old rocks near Lake Superior and elusive evidence in the rocks of South Africa extend life's history back over 3 billion years but evidence this old is rare and hard to find. Dr. Knoll has traveled from the frozen shores of the Arctic island of Spitsbergen to the hot plains of South Africa in search of signs of ancient existence. He is an expert in locating fossil evidence of earliest life.
In January of this year, Opportunity, the second of two robotic rovers landed on the Martian surface joining her sister explorer, Spirit. The two rovers are doing what Andy Knoll does, closely examining rocks to search for signs of the existence of water and ultimately life. Rather than the rock strewn plains seen by previous Mars explorers, the walls of the Endurance crater are made up of layered rocks – rocks laid down by wind, volcanic eruptions or water. Old hands at the Mars exploration game have had little experience with these kinds of rocks but Andy Knoll is well acquainted with them.
Has there ever been water on the surface of Mars? Is there life on this distant planet now, or has there been in the ancient past? We don't know these answers yet, but I would bet that Andy Knoll will be one of the first scientists to see and correctly identify Martian life.
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