{"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. Gretchen is an astro-geologist who studies craters. Her studies at university started in psychology, but one elective unit changed all that.Gretchen 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.She’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.Counting 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.As 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. This 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. 00:00 Welcome & Big Questions About Mars01:28 From Stargazing to Science: Gretchen’s Early Journey05:38 From Psychology to Physics — Learning Through Failure07:45 Meteorites, Asteroids, and Earth’s Place in Space14:55 Falling in Love with Rocks: Meteorites, Geology, and Fieldwork24:58 Pawsey, Data, and the Power of Supercomputing33:16 Craters as Clocks: Dating Mars and the...","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}