By Jenny Hall
Scientists estimated that in five billion years the sun will become a
red giant, swallowing up Earth and everything else in its path. Darlene
Lim, a PhD student in geology and an expert on Mars exploration, is
planning ahead.
“Eventually we will lose our biosphere; we will actually have to get
humans off this planet,” she says. “We have to get beyond the Earth and
then potentially move outside our own solar system.”
Lim has spent several field seasons in the Canadian High Arctic working
on the NASA Haughton Mars Project. Led by the SETI (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, the initiative brings
researchers together at Haughton Crater, the site of an impact event
that occurred 23 million years ago.
The crater functions as what’s called a Mars analog because of its
geologic and environmental similarities to the red planet. “If you put
on red sunglasses and look at the landscape, it’s amazing,” she says.
“It looks like a Viking or a Pathfinder image.”
Lim is a paleolimnologist — she studies ancient lakes — and her own
research focuses on climate change. A chance meeting at a conference put
her in touch with NASA researchers who wanted someone to study sediment
at the crater, once a lake.
Scientists know that there is water on the surface of Mars, mostly
likely in a solid state, and believe it might once have had flowing
water on its surface. “Here on Earth we know that where you find water
you’ll most likely find life,” explains Lim. Lim has her parents to
thank for her interest in science — and Jacques Cousteau. “He was my
childhood hero,” she says. “And the naturalist in me was developed
through my parents. My folks came here from Singapore. They were great.
They really embraced their new country. I mean, you don’t go camping in
crowded areas in Asia.”
Lim has written articles for children’s magazines, acted as a TV
commentator during Mars probe missions and made dozens of presentations
to school children. “You just never know who in that audience could be
the first one to step out on the surface of Mars,” she says. “Or one of
them might be the person that builds the capsule that takes people to Mars.”
This sense of personal responsibility feeds into Lim’s emphatic belief
in the importance of scientific research. “From our standpoint, sitting
here in North America, I think it’s our responsibility to push forward
for exploration of other planets,” she says. “It’s our privilege and
it’s our luxury to be able to sit in our offices and think of those things.”
NASA has no official mandate to send humans to Mars but the Mars
Society, a non-profit research organization, also operates at the
crater. In the summer of 2000 Lim was part of the inaugural crew of the
Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, the world’s first Mars
simulation base.
“It looks like a 21-foot-high giant paint can,” she says of the
simulator she lived in for two summers. A mission to Mars, given the
current state of technology, would take about three years — 11 months
to reach the planet, 500 days spent on the surface and 11 months to
return to Earth.
“It’s the ultimate road trip,” says Lim, who also has a pilot’s license
— something she picked up between speaking gigs and trips to the
Arctic. After completing her degree later this year, Lim is bound for a
post-doctoral fellowship at the NASA Ames Research Centre in California.
Lim sees Mars as a springboard to other kinds of space exploration. “If
you can get humans to Mars,” she says, “if you can help them establish a
civilization there, then I think you have the potential to move off and
perpetuate the human race.”
[Jenny Hall is a feature writer at the School of Graduate Studies. This
story is one of a series that will appear in The Bulletin and on the SGS
Web site at www.sgs.utoronto.ca/gradprofiles.]
