Research
Organic Carbon in Mars-Analog Environments
Project Description: NASA's TATOOINE (Testing Arid Transformation Of Organics via IN situ Extraction) project aims to identify early geochemical drivers of organic matter preservation. There are certain organic components that have high preservation potential, so when searching for life on Mars, they become key targets for finding evidence of ancient life.
My Role: I am in charge of collecting the total organic carbon data from samples collected in the Mojave Desert (an environment similar to Mars) by the NASA team. This process includes homogenizing the raw samples, acidifying them with 2M HCl, rinsing with nanopure water and a centrifuge, and combusting them with a carbon elemental analyzer.
Status: Spring '25 - Ongoing
My Current Work
Past Work
Updates
Bat Guano Update
Before we are able to sort through the bat guano samples, we have to let them sit overnight in a solution. My task today was to make the solution, consisting of 10% Sodium Hexametaphosphate in deionized water.
Mineralogy Update
My mentor and I discussed topics to help me better understand the machine learning and data analytics process. The topics included: Libraries, multicollinearity, SMOTE, and hyperparameter tuning.
Isotope Update
Today, we reviewed a research paper (titled "Application of Fragment Ion Information as Further Evidence in Probabilistic Compound Screening Using Bayesian Statistics and Machine Learning: A Leap Toward Automation") and discussed certain aspects used by the authors that we could implement as a part of our project.