Exploring Mars Through Geology with Ellie Moreland

Eleanor Moreland is a planetary geologist and Ph.D. candidate at Rice University who has always loved solving mysteries, and today, she studies clues hidden inside rocks: minerals! Ellie works on methods to identify mineral fingerprints in rocks and applies these methods to planets beyond Earth. As part of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover Science Team, her research helps find minerals in data collected by the PIXL instrument. In this talk, she will share why minerals are such powerful storytellers in geology and how scientists use them to uncover the environments that shaped our planetary neighbor.