Episode 2: Moon Craters and Mars Meteorites with Gretchen Benedix
How to count 94 million craters in 24 hours
The world is still buzzing about the Moon since Artemis II landed back on Earth from its voyage around our space neighbour.
In the latest podcast episode of HPC Hearts and Minds, we sat down with Professor Gretchen Benedix, an astro-geologist and Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research at Curtin University.
From her beginnings under the rural skies of Idaho to leading world-class research, Gretchen shares how a single Astronomy 101 elective pivoted her career from psychology to physics and geology.
Hear how she transitioned from the painstaking manual work of identifying just 132 asteroids in 1989 to using High Performance Computing (HPC) to map a staggering 94 million craters on Mars in only 24 hours.
We talk about everything from ejecta from Mars landing on Earth, to learning what is waiting for us on the moons of Titan and Europa.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome & Big Questions About Mars
01:28 From Stargazing to Science: Gretchen’s Early Journey
05:38 From Psychology to Physics — Learning Through Failure
07:45 Meteorites, Asteroids, and Earth’s Place in Space
14:55 Falling in Love with Rocks: Meteorites, Geology, and Fieldwork
24:58 Pawsey, Data, and the Power of Supercomputing
33:16 Craters as Clocks: Dating Mars and the Moon
40:33 Mapping 94 Million Craters with Machine Learning
58:29 The Bigger Picture: Life, Planets, and What Comes Next
Pull quotes
“In physics, it’s like you have to imagine particles interacting… and geology is you pick up a rock and you look at it and you go, ‘This rock cooled really, really slowly and it is very primitive.’ It’s the tangibility I guess the holding of things.”
“Science, especially over the years, science has kind of found ways to explain things that previously were unknown and kind of scary and we didn’t understand it. And so by being able to explain it, it kind of gives it less—it’s less scary, but it’s it helps us kind of find our place, I guess.”
“When you set your mind to do something hard, the stuff that’s really helpful will fall out of it. There’s some interesting things that I think will come out of some of these studies… trying to figure out how you will go survive on the moon as a human will lead to amazing new technology here on Earth.”
“Planetary science in a nutshell is we have only ever had the pieces that come to us. They’re gifted to us and we love it and it’s great and we can understand so much about that. But where did it come from? How do we know?”
“The Earth doesn’t exist in a bubble. It exists because of what the solar system looks like. And what’s weird is why the Earth is the way it is. It’s different.”
“The puzzle is huge. Each piece is super tiny and on its own. You may not see where it fits… but over time those pieces start to fit together and you can add a new piece that says, ‘Oh, that picture is going to move over there now’.”