{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"HPC Hearts & Minds","title":"Ep 2: Moon Craters and Mars Meteorites","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3669,"description":"With Artemis II back on Earth, the world is abuzz about the Moon. In this episode we sat down with Professor Gretchen Benedix, Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at Curtin University. \n\nGretchen is an astro-geologist who studies craters. Her studies at university started in psychology, but one elective unit changed all that.\nGretchen has moved from the US, to the UK, eventually finding her way to Australia, where she has worked on projects like the Desert Fireball Network, which watches the sky and lets the team know when a new asteroid has landed on Earth.\nShe’s gone on expeditions to Antarctica to pick up meteorites, can analyse rocks that made the journey from Mars all the way to Earth, and even has an asteroid named after her.\nCounting craters helps astro-geologists to understand the surface ages of planets. Older maps of craters on planets were painstakingly counted by hand. For Mars, it took over six years to identify 385,000 craters that were 1 kilometre wide.\nAs technology has improved, so has that ability to count. Using Pawsey’s supercomputer, Gretchen’s team analysed vast datasets of high-resolution images from Mars missions. Through machine learning, they automated crater detection, identifying more than 90 million impact craters in just 24 hours – a task that would have taken years manually.\nThis work informed the world’s largest Mars crater database, enabling researchers to determine the age of surface features with unprecedented accuracy. It also supported major discoveries, including tracing the origin of the 'Black Beauty' meteorite back to a specific crater on Mars.\n00:00 Welcome & Big Questions About Mars\n01:28 From Stargazing to Science: Gretchen’s Early Journey\n05:38 From Psychology to Physics — Learning Through Failure\n07:45 Meteorites, Asteroids, and Earth’s Place in Space\n14:55 Falling in Love with Rocks: Meteorites, Geology, and Fieldwork\n24:58 Pawsey, Data, and the Power of Supercomputing\n33:16 Craters as Clocks: Dating Mars...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/e807B7P8dWYNBNVZXiHGWJEh4wHX8jfEaynZCzpbsNo/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9lZGU5/OGVkYjE3YTlhMDFl/NGIzMTMwYjY5YTI1/OWE0OC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}