UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This fall, NASA’s Curiosity rover reached new heights.

Curiosity landed on Mars a decade ago to study whether Earth’s rocky neighbor could have supported microbial life in its deep past. Since then, the rover's explorations have thrilled scientists and the public alike by finding evidence that the planet’s ancient history included persistent liquid water, the right chemistry to support living microbes and intriguing carbon signatures, among many other discoveries.

Along its journey, Curiosity has driven 18 miles within Gale Crater and more than 2,000 feet up Mount Sharp — a three-mile-tall Martian mountain at the crater’s center. In October, the rover finally reached a long-sought region of the mountain enriched with salty minerals possibly left behind as the planet dried — climbing higher than it ever has in the process.

Back on Earth, Ben Tutolo can relate.

“I still haven’t come back down from the fact that I was picked to be part of the Curiosity team,” said Tutolo, an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Calgary who was selected by NASA to study data from the salty region.

Tutolo, who received his undergraduate degree from Penn State, was one of four graduates of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences selected this year to join the Curiosity science team as participating scientists. NASA picked about two dozen proposals in a competitive process, choosing a new group of scientists to play active roles in daily planning and to conduct research important to the mission.

Also selected were Elisabeth "Libby" Hausrath, professor of geosciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Laura Rodriguez, staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and Jennifer Eigenbrode, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who all received their doctoral degrees from the Department of Geosciences. Tutolo, Hausrath and Rodriguez are new to the mission.

“I think this speaks to the quality of our college,” said Chris House, professor of geosciences and director of the Consortium for Planetary and Exoplanetary Sciences and Technology at Penn State, and a participating scientist on the rover team. “This is an eclectic mix of people. They are different scientists who all came from EMS with different advisers, and they were chosen in this competitive process.”

The group joins a larger cohort of Penn State geosciences faculty and alumni who are active on rover missions — both Curiosity and the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover.

“I didn’t realize the full extent of it until an astrobiology conference last May,” said Rodriguez, who at the time was a postdoctoral scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We had a Penn State reunion and all these people showed up. There were a lot of them, and many were working on Mars missions.”

House said the deep connections demonstrate the increased involvement of geoscientists in NASA missions, and Penn State’s work preparing its students to rise to the occasion.

“I think for many years we’ve been preparing our students really well in astrobiology,” House said. “So as NASA missions become more and more astrobiology related, Penn State people have become more and more relevant for those missions. It’s a super exciting time as mission topics become related to the search for life, and I hope that excitement translates to new scientists coming on board and also the public’s engagement in these missions.”

WE ARE … Martians

Tutolo’s journey to Mars began on a gently sloping forest hillside near the University Park campus.

An environmental systems engineering major at Penn State, Tutolo discovered a love for geochemistry his last semester while taking GEOSC 413W Techniques in Environmental Geochemistry, which included field work at Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory near Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center in Huntingdon County.

“Now Shale Hills is this globally famous place I read about in research, but really it’s just another swale somewhere in Pennsylvania,” said Tutolo, who grew up in Lower Burrell, a small city just northeast of Pittsburgh.

“But it was an eye-opening experience,” he said. “We took all these things I’d been learning since grade school about the scientific method — hypothesis and data collection, all this stuff— and we were actually doing it. It was the first time as a scientist that I was doing investigative science and it was really life changing.”

Tutolo followed his passion for aqueous geochemistry, and he is now an associate professor at the University of Calgary. His research includes work on magnesium sulphate lakes in British Columbia — rare on Earth and a potential analogue for conditions on ancient Mars.

As these ephemeral lakes evaporate, they actively precipitate sulphate minerals — including Epsom salt. Scientists believe the salty region on Mount Sharp contains similar minerals. And studying this region on Mars may provide new clues about how and why Mars’ climate changed from one with permanent water to the frozen desert it is today, NASA scientists said.

“The rover can shoot these minerals with a laser to see their chemistry and that can give us clues for the habitability — the potential origins of life on Mars,” Tutolo said. “Is it possible they are so salty you can’t originate life or is it possible that you actually need this cycling between wet and dry to have reactions that produce amino acids and nucleotides?”

Life on Mars?

Studying the origins of life can smell so sweet.

Wafts of caramelizing sugar would greet Laura Rodriguez during her doctoral research at Penn State, studying how genetic precursors formed on early Earth. Her work focused on how heterocycles — ringed molecules that serve as nucleobases, or subunits, of DNA and RNA — reacted with complex prebiotic mixtures on early Earth to form more complex molecules — –including how heterocycles reacted with the process theorized to have first formed complex sugars on Earth.

“I got a unique skillset from doing organic chemistry in a geosciences department where I also acquired the planetary science background,” Rodriguez said. “That was a huge deal, because I already had the foundational knowledge from Penn State of what are we doing on Mars. That put me ahead of the game and gave me the foundation to choose where to go in my career.”

Because her doctoral work produced large amounts of data, Rodriguez also started down the path of data science while at Penn State. She honed those skills as a postdoctoral scholar with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, analyzing samples taken from deep sea vents with Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), an analytical method that can identify organic and elemental hotspots strongly correlated with life.

This process is difficult because contaminants like iron and atmospheric carbon dioxide can mask the organic signals. But Rodriguez developed a method to tease out useful information from the spectra, and said the process may be applicable to instruments on rover missions.

“Once we have a good method of teasing out organic compounds, we can use ChemCam to look for organic carbon hotspots,” she said. “The ChemCam is fast — shoot it, get the data the next day — so my idea was that if we could develop this, we can use it a of survey tool to help identify interesting sites for further analysis.”

Follow the water

Elisabeth Hausrath was a doctoral student studying aqueous geochemistry at Penn State in 2004 when the twin Mars Exploration Rovers — Spirit and Opportunity — landed on Mars.

When the rovers sent back evidence of water in the red planet’s past, it piqued Hausrath’s interest in water-rock interactions beyond Earth. She and her adviser Sue Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences, wrote a NASA proposal that funded the rest of Hausrath’s work at Penn State.

Her work included a trip to Svalbard, a remote artic archipelago about halfway between Norway and the north pole, to study water-rock interactions in an environment that’s a stand-in for Mars.

“I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Penn State and especially Sue Brantley,” Hausrath said “She was great at teaching us how to give talks and how to write and practice good ethical science. I still quote her to this day to my students.”

As part of the Curiosity mission, Hausrath will examine chemical and mineralogical evidence of alteration in Gale Crater to help understand water’s role in its geological history.

Hausrath, who is also a participating scientist on the Perseverance rover science team, said she wrote several proposals to join Curiosity before she was selected this year.

“Perseverance is really well named — because that’s what it takes to stay in science,” she said. “I would really encourage students to persevere in science because it can be a really challenging and difficult road. It’s difficult for everybody. But if they persevere, then we all benefit from a more diverse and larger scientific community.”