Visitors to the village of Drumnadrochit, on the western shore of Scotland’s murky Loch Ness, come to see the nearby ruins of Urquhart Castle or risk a glimpse of the elusive Loch Ness Monster. But growing up in Drumnadrochit, planetary scientist Robin Wordsworth says it was the unobstructed view of the cosmos that caught his eye. “There are incredibly clear skies up there,” he says.
Today, Wordsworth lives across the Atlantic. He is a researcher and professor at Harvard University. But his gaze is still on the solar system and beyond. From studying how rocky planets can occasionally become encased in glaciers to exploring the sizes of alien raindrops or the details of how humans might one day settle on Mars, Wordsworth’s scientific explorations vary widely. His research group tends to “do a lot of different things at once,” he says. “If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would be to understand what drives habitability on planets over time.”
Featured Research
Wordsworth defines the habitability of a planet as its ability to support life. The idea that life could survive elsewhere in the cosmos has always fascinated Wordsworth, a fan of science fiction. In addition to Earth, astronomers have discovered about 20 potentially habitable worlds in the universe. With data collected by ground-based observatories, satellites, and rovers, he uses supercomputers to build simulations of planets and the evolution of their climates. Climate is an important topic because it determines whether a planet’s surface can support liquid water, a necessity for all known forms of life.
Wordsworth’s most notable research reconstructs the climate of early Mars. Martian river valleys and other geological clues suggest that abundant liquid water once flowed across the Red Planet, and the early Martian climate has become a hot topic for scientists searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. But for decades, the best researchers could do was build one-dimensional models that struggled to replicate key atmospheric components, like clouds.
In 2013, while at the Dynamic Meteorology Laboratory in Paris, Wordsworth and colleagues presented a 3-D model of the early Martian climate, with clouds and an atmosphere containing large amounts of carbon dioxide. Those are key components for studying how the early Martian atmosphere might have reflected and trapped heat, says Penn State astrobiologist James Kasting.
Wordsworth was the one who figured out how to incorporate clouds into the model, thanks to his strong programming skills, math skills and determination, says Kasting. He has been publishing the best climate calculations for early Mars. There’s really no one else who’s in his lane.”
Whats Next
Wordsworth’s supernatural reconstructions can help us better understand whether life could have arisen on Mars or elsewhere. Another line of his research could help humans one day settle on the Red Planet.
Today, most of the surface of Mars is too cold to support liquid water, and the planet’s thin atmosphere offers little protection from the sun’s intense ultraviolet radiation. These conditions make it inhospitable to would-be Martian colonists. But in a 2019 study, Wordsworth and his colleagues proposed that insulating silica airgel sheets deployed over ice-covered areas might make survival possible.
In laboratory tests, layers of airgel just centimeters thick filtered 60 percent of UVA and UVB radiation and almost all of the more dangerous UVC rays, while allowing enough light to pass through for photosynthesis. Additionally, the shields heated the air below by more than 50 degrees Celsius, which could make liquid water and growing crops possible. Looking to the future, Wordsworth plans to investigate how colonists on Mars could use bioplastics or other renewable materials to become self-sufficient.
And far beyond the Red Planet, exoplanets await. “The James Webb Space Telescope has just started collecting new exoplanet data,” says Wordsworth. Observations of their atmospheres will help researchers test ideas about how these distant planets and their climates evolve, he says. “It’s an incredibly exciting time.”
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