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In this video, I'll introduce you to

those parts of the solar system which may
have contributed to the evolution
of life on our planet.
This picture shows the two planets with
the biggest potential to harbor life.
The planet in the foreground is,
of course, our own.
This is the famous eye in London.
The planet in the background is Mars,
clearly visible despite
the many city lights of London.
I hope you looked at our
neighboring planet in the sky.
If not, you should do so
next time it's visible in the night sky.
It may not be obvious in this picture but
Mars has a distinct red color
compared to the stars around it.
Mars orbits the sun
outside the Earth orbit.
When the Earth is just
inside Mars in its orbit,
there's still no less than 55 million
kilometers between the two planets.
Despite the enormous distance we have
a number of samples of Mars here on Earth.
Believe it or not, they have found
their way to the Earth themselves.
Here's an example of a Martian meteorite
called Tissint after the area in
Morocco where it fell.
It fell in the summer of 2011.
Note the shiny fusion crust over here.
And the inner parts of
the meteorite on this side.
Due to the very dry
conditions in the fall area,
this meteorite is
extraordinarily well preserved.
It looks just like it
did when it left Mars.
But why do we think that a dull grey rock
like this one should come from Mars?
Well first of all the grey
color is probably the least
significant characteristics of this rock.
We need to look at the minerals
it's composed of, and
how they are organized in the rock.
What we find is that this is a rock that
crystallized from a melt, and keeping in
mind that most meteorites are chondrites
that are collections of dust and
particles from the early solar system.
This is clearly different.
This is a volcanic rock, quite similar
to basalts that we find here on Earth.
You may already have looked at the video

where Jim Connelly shows you how

you can analyse the minerals and
rocks to determine their age.
When we date Tissint we
get a surprising result.
Only 170 million years old.
Almost every meteorite has
an age of about 4,500 million years.
So this is a lot younger.
Tissint is a volcanic rock,
it must come from a volcano which was
active during the last 170 million years.
So where in the solar system,
besides the Earth of course,
do we find active volcanoes?
We need to find a rocky planetary
body in the solar system which has
remained active throughout most if not
all of the history of the solar system.
This diagram shows you how
long time we believe that
the volcanic activity lasted
on the main candidates.
This is a timeline from the birth
of the solar system to the present.
The vertical axes show you the diameter
of the different bodies we're looking at.
The yellow line shows you the age of the
Shergottite meteorites such as this one,
which is 170 million years,
as you just learned.
The white lines show you how long time we
believe the volcanic activity
lasted on the different planets.
The first thing we see is that the larger
bodies remained active much longer than
the small bodies.
This is simply because large
bodies start out hotter and
cools much slower than small bodies.
The Earth is obviously still active.
And we believe that Venus is also active.
The third largest rocky or
terrestrial planet is Mars.
And like Venus, we have no clear
indication of volcanic activity, but
we know that it has been
active quite recently,
possibly as recent as
a few million years ago.
Other candidates like Mercury,
the Moon, and the asteroid Vesta,
show clear signs of volcanic activity but
not in the recent past.
They are simply too small.
There is actually one other possibility.
You may be aware that Jupiter's
moon, Io,
is still very active, even though it is
approximately the same size as our moon.

It's being kept active through interaction

with Jupiter's massive gravity field.
Io is however, not a candidate
as it's very sulfur rich.
And very different from
the rock I'm showing you here.
The only real candidates
are therefore Venus and Mars.
The problem with Venus is that
is has a massive atmosphere,
about 100 times thicker
than our atmosphere.
This would make it very hard to
knock off a rock on its surface and
send it out through the atmosphere.
Also Venus' gravity field is about
the same magnitude as ours,
which makes it much less likely than Mars.
The age itself thus leaves us with
just one obvious candidate, Mars.
There is another piece of evidence
that points directly to Mars.
Many of the Martian meteorites such as
this one has been analysed and
they contain small gas vesicles.
In this diagram you can see that
a number of gas species have
been found in the vesicles, krypton,
neon, argon, xenon, nitrogen and CO2.
We can compare the gas compositions
with that of the Martian atmosphere and
the result is impressive.
There's a near total match between
the gas in the meteorites and
the Martian atmosphere.
And since the Martian atmosphere is unique
in the solar system, it leaves little
doubt that this meteorite and the other
Martian meteorites are indeed from Mars.
And how do we know the composition
of the Martian atmosphere?
Well, we've known it since the 1970s when
NASA's Viking probes landed on Mars.
Here's a picture taking by one of
the Viking probes, showing you rocks,
red dust, and grime on the red planet.
Pretty amazing that you can
pick up a rock in Morocco and
not only determine when it formed,
but also that it is from Mars.
So why is Mars so interesting?
This model of Mars shows
a couple of the reasons.
Note the northern hemisphere on Mars
has much fewer craters than the moon.
This shows us that this part of Mars has
been much more active than the Moon.
Being next to the asteroid belt, Mars has
probably suffered many more impacts than
the Moon, so the near absence of

craters on the northern hemisphere must

indicate that processes on Mars covered or
destroyed the craters with time.
Another prominent feature is this canyon,
Valles Marineris.
It is 3,500 km long and
more than 12 km deep.
Grand Canyon in the US is no comparison.
Valles Marineris is as long as
the distance between the east and
the west coast in the United States, and
it's 10 times deeper than Grand Canyon.
But that's not the most
interesting feature though.
We can see that water has been
running down through the canyon.
We can see how high
the water level was and
we can also calculate the speed on
the basis of the slope of the canyon.
The amazing result that the flow of water
peaked at 5 cubic kilometers per second.
Let me repeat that.
Five cubic kilometers per second.
That's a lot of water, about 25
thousand times more than the flow of
water through the Amazon River
during the rainy season.
Another prominent feature
on Mars is the volcanoes.
This is Olympus Mons.
At 25 kilometers the highest
mountain in the solar system.
If we look at the elevation map of Mars
we can see what happened to the water,
the map covers the entire martian
surface including the northern and
southern ice caps.
Note that the orange and
red colors show elevations up to 4,000
meter above the average elevation on Mars.
Whereas the blue colors show elevations
about 5,000 meters below the average.
The water from Valles Marineris
must have flowed up here.
And may have covered the entire
northern hemisphere for a while.
We believe that life can only
exist in the presence of water.
The unambiguous evidence for abundant
water on Mars in the past, therefore,
opens the possibility that Mars
life could have existed and
even that it still may exist on Mars.
That's the main reason why Mars is being
targeted by so many space missions.
Some of the missions
are mapping Mars from space,
while others have landed on its surface.
Shown here are the two Viking landers,

the polar lander, Phoenix.

The first rover on Mars,
Mars pathfinder, the two exploration
rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
And, the most recent rover, Curiosity.
All of these have contributed
significantly to our understanding of
the history of water on Mars.
Images from orbit also show us that
water is still present on Mars.
This picture shows the summit of
Olympus Mons above clouds of water vapor.
This picture shows
the northern ice cap on Mars.
The ice cap on Mars is somewhat
different to those on Earth,
as the temperatures get much lower.
The Martian ice caps are therefore
not only composed of water ice,
during the Martian winter,
they also have a crusting of CO2 ice.
There are also hints that liquid water may
have been present in the very recent past.
This picture shows that something
has flowed down this canyon and
deposited the eroded sediments
on top of this dune field.
The most likely interpretation is that
this feature is due to flowing water and
that the flow was active
after the dunes formed.
Another piece of evidence comes from
the Allen Hills 84001 meteorite that
I mentioned in the previous video.
We found evidence that the Martian
ground water flowed through the rock
during Mars' wet pre-history.
There's no doubt that water is
abundant on the Red Planet, and
that liquid water has circulated above and
below the surface on Mars.
The question we need to answer,
if the water not only made it possible for
life to exist.
Did life ever exist on Mars?
So far, we don't know the answer.
All we know is that it is a possibility.
You may have wondered how the Martian
meteorites made it to the Earth?
This display is full
of Martian meteorites.
But how did they get here.
Mars is right next to
the asteroid belt and
thus has suffered many
impacts during its history.
Impacts excavated fragments from
the surface of Mars and sent them
up through the thin atmosphere of Mars,
up into free orbit around the sun.

Although the atmosphere and

the gravity field make it more difficult,
it's basically the same process that
delivers meteorites from asteroids.
Once a fragment has escaped
the gravity field of Mars,
it goes into orbit around the sun.
It will remain in orbit around
the Sun until it, something or
possibly gets flung out
of the solar system.
And since the Earth is the closest planet,
no less than 25% of the fragments
from Mars end up hitting the Earth.
It often takes several million years
before the orbits are perturbed enough to
hit the Earth, but
it's still amazing that 25%
of the material is being
delivered freely to our planet.
Unfortunately, only very few of
the fragments that hit the Earth
are ever recovered.
We estimate that a total of 500
kilos hits the Earth every year.
Although most of the samples take millions
of years to travel to the Earth, few of
them probably get here much faster.
A large impact ejects
millions of fragments and
one of them will of course be
the first one to arrive on Earth.
Simulations have shown that the first
fragment usually arrives on
Earth within a year.
So why is this interesting?
Well, if there are primitive
lifeforms in the rock,
it seems very likely that they would not
only survive being ejected from Mars and
falling on the Earth, they could also
easily survive up to a year in space.
Life may therefore have spread from one
planet to another within our solar system.
If there's life on Mars, it may be
closely related to life on Earth.
Or perhaps, and
even more interesting, it's possible that
life on Earth originally came from Mars.
We may all be Martians.
Let us turn to something more familiar,
our own moon.
You may not have realized it before,
but our moon is very unusual.
Compared to its parent planet it's
the largest moon orbiting a planet.
It's also the only real moon
in the inner solar system.
Mercury and Venus both lack a moon.
Mars has two, but

they are small captured asteroids and

therefore no comparison to our moon.
Another peculiar fact is that the moon
has no metal core or at the most,
a very small one.
If the moon formed along with the Earth.
It should have the same chemical
composition including the same amount of
metal, but it's obviously different.
We have plenty of samples of
the Moon from a variety of sources.
You can see some of them
here in this display case.
Up here we have a sample from
Apollo 17 including a flag that
has travelled to the Moon and back.
And down here we have a selection of Lunar
meteorites that have travelled to
the Earth on their own.
The only possible model which can
explain the properties of the Moon is a
so-called, Giant Impact Model,
in which one of the last, and
largest object to accrete to the Earth
struck us in a grazing impact.
Detailed calculations of the impact
shows that under certain conditions,
the core of the impactor
will merge with the Earth.
Whereas the mantle of the impactor form
a debris cloud in orbit around the Earth.
We believe that the Moon formed
from the debris orbiting the Earth
after the giant impact.
The result was an Earth which
is slightly more metal rich and
a moon which is completely or
almost completely metal free.
If you're interested in seeing the impact,
I've posted a link to an animation
on YouTube and the course materials.
Although impacts were much more common
during the phase when the planets grew by
scooping up material from the disk around
the sun, the risk is not over yet.
The Earth and the other planets
have experienced large impact
throughout the solar system history, and
they will continue to do so in the
future, unless we find a way to
deflect objects heading for the Earth.
This graph shows you an estimate of
the risk of impacts of different sizes.
Down here, you see the diameter of
the asteroid that might hit us.
The vertical axis gives you the number of
fatalities such an impact could cause.
Not surprisingly, the graph shows that
big impacts are much more dangerous than

small ones.
A 100 meter asteroid could
potentially kill thousands of humans,
whereas a ten kilometer asteroid could
kill nearly every human on the planet.
Fortunately, such large impacts only
happen about once in 100 million years.
On the other hand, since we know that
life has existed on the Earth for
billions of years, it seems obvious
that catastrophes caused by
impacts must have shaped
the evolution of life on Earth.
The last very large impact on
the Earth happened 66 million
years ago a ten kilometer asteroid
hit the Earth. As a result
approximately 75% of all species became
extinct including the dinosaurs.
One of the world's best geological sites,
to see the result of the impact,
is 30 kilometers south of Copenhagen,
here at Stevns Klint.
If you look at the cliff behind me,
you can see that the top and
bottom halves are different.
And right in the middle is
a Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.
So, let's climb down and have a look.
So,
here's the actual boundary layer.
The grey layer between the chalks
of the Cretaceous down here and
the Tertiary up here.
Unlike other major geological boundaries,
this layer is characterised
by a major Iridium Anomaly.
Iridium here on Earth is
normally located in the core.
It's concentrated with all
the metals in our core,
so on the surface where we are now,
iridium is exceedingly rare.
So the discovery that this layer is
loaded with iridium signals that
something must have hit us from
the outside, an extraterrestrial object.
And based on the amount of iridium
deposited worldwide in the boundary layer,
we are able to calculate
that the size of the impact,
the diameter of the asteroid that hit us,
must have been about 10 kilometers.
That's a very large object that
would create a crater hundreds of
kilometers across.
But, we didn't know of any such crater.
But, after the surprising
discovery of iridium in the
boundary layer a world wide search

was initiated to find the crater.

But, it took some 20 years
before a 200 kilometer
diameter impact crater on the coast of the
Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico, was found.
Later in the course we'll have
a look at the consequences for
evolution of life on Earth,
of such a giant impact.
So, we'll return to this site and
look at the consequences.
Other smaller and younger craters
also show the effects of impacts.
Here's a famous meteor crater in Arizona,
just south of the Grand Canyon.
And here's a less famous, but
larger crater,
the Northern Quebec Crater in Canada.
All in all we have found approximately
200 craters around the world.
And still smaller objects can cause
damage, even though they disintegrate in
the atmosphere such as the event
in Chelyabinsk in 2013.
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