Let’s be real here: the odds of a meteorite landing on you are astronomically low. However, the likelihood of knowledge dropping on you from UNLV geoscientist Arya Udry is a different story.

On any given day, Earth is being pelted with over 48 tons-worth of space rocks, or meteoritic material. Most burn up on the way down through the atmosphere, though thousands have made it to the surface. All of these rocks are crystallized from magma, which brings us to Udry’s unique area of expertise.

“I study magmatic rocks, or rocks that form from the cooling of magma and lava,” said Udry. “You can find these in places like Hawaii and the Sierra Nevada, but my specialization is extraterrestrial magmatic rocks – especially from Mars.”

To date, there are over 75,000 recovered meteorites on Earth, with about 250 from Mars. The latter is possible when a meteor impacts Mars at a speed high enough to eject a piece of the Red Planet into space, eventually landing on Earth.

“There are extraterrestrial materials landing on Earth every day,” said Udry. “These clues fall from the sky and help us understand how the Martian interior and surface have changed over its entire geological history of 4.6 billion years.”

Udry has spent over a decade at UNLV studying extraterrestrial magmatic rocks. Most recently, she’s been working on NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission, remotely examining rocks from the Jezero Crater – a site that may have once nurtured life.

“This has been my dream since I was a child,” she said. “I grew up reading sci-fi from Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance with my mother, and wanted to be an astronaut or work with space however I could.”

In her continual pursuit of expanding our understanding of the geologic past, she’s been awarded a National Science Foundation grant for $1.1 million. This will see the installation of a cutting-edge electron probe micro-analyzer on UNLV’s campus.

This means any micron-sized solid material, including bits from meteorites, can be examined in finer detail than ever before. Udry anticipates that scientists from all over the Southwest will use the new instrument in their research.

“In my field, this will help us conduct chemical analyses of minerals, see how they are formed, or how they evolve in magma,” said Udry. “And that can tell you much more about the evolution of everything from rocks to planets – understanding how similar or different Mars is from the terrestrial interior of Earth.”

The instrument is expected to be constructed and in place later this summer.

Galactic-Sized Fun Facts

Some of the youngest lava flow dated on Mars is less than a million years old, which scientists consider to be very recent in terms of the galaxy’s billions-of-years-long history. So, when Udry’s able to get her hands on a meteorite from Mars, it’s an opportunity to learn more about the beginnings of Mars, Earth, and the rest of the solar system.

“The distance from the sun to Earth is one astronomical unit, or 93 million miles,” said Udry. “Some of these samples come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and that’s about five times the distance.”

Meteorites may travel a (very) long way to see us, but you won’t have to go anywhere for some of Udry’s favorite facts from Mars and beyond. Here’s what she had to share, in her words:

The Heights of Olympus

Olympus Mons on Mars is the highest mountain and volcano in the solar system. It’s about 16 miles high! And it is somewhat geologically similar to what you find in Hawaii – what’s called a hot spot. You have magma coming from very deep inside the planet, likely the boundaries of the core.

Speaking of the core, the big difference between rocks on Earth and the rest of the inner solar system – that includes Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt – is that the other rocky planets don’t have much in the way of plate tectonics. Because of that, we don’t see the diversity of rocks that we do on Earth, which have undergone billions of years of processes.

The Grand(est) Canyon

Mars has the largest peak, but also by far the largest canyon – Valles Marineris. It’s around 2,500 miles long, meaning it would almost stretch from the east coast to the west coast of the U.S.

Valles Marineris is five miles deep, so you could just about fit all of Mt. Everest inside. Imagine the Grand Canyon, but much, much, much bigger. One of the hypotheses is that a heavy amount of volcanic activity thickened the crust continually and reformed the planet to the point that a giant fault was created from it.

Meteorites by Any Other Name

The Mars Perseverance rover is collecting a variety of rocks, including sedimentary rocks that can tell us about surface processes and the potential for life on Mars. Do we have the right conditions for life to have happened?

And most people think that meteorites are iron. You might visualize them as chunks of iron, but that’s not the case. Most meteorites are actually chondrites, meaning they have a little bit of metal in them. They can look a lot like desert varnish, but their surface is black because the rock legitimately melted in the atmosphere.

It’s neat because when I look at the night sky, I remember that I have pieces of what’s up there in my office – I get to touch Mars every day. To me, that’s so cool. Being able to study volcanoes with rocks from other planets is a lifelong dream that’s become a reality, and that’s very exciting.