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So I hunt for water in a particular set of meteorites which come from the asteroid Vesta.

Asteroids are thought to be the shattered remnants of small bodies formed within the young Sun’s solar nebula. These ‘minor bodies’ are therefore key to understanding how the solar system formed and evolved. As leftover planetary building blocks, they are of great importance in understanding the compositions and evolution of planets. They may also provide clues to the delivery of water, to the early Earth. Water along with other volatile elements play a very important role in how a planet forms and develops through their influence on melting, viscosity, magma crystallization and volcanic eruption.

Water is also key to life as we know it. “Follow the water” has been a saying used a lot in space science when looking for potentially habitable moons or planets.  My work is trying to find out if there is water in meteorites and asteroids, where that water comes from and how water arrived on Earth.

To do this I look at a specific mineral found in meteorites and normal terrestrial rocks called apatite (it’s the same stuff that makes up our bones and teeth) as this mineral is know to be able to contain water. After finding these using a powerful microscope, far more powerful than those at your schools, I get to coat the sample in pure gold and fire a tiny ion beam at the apatite which blasts a small crater in the mineral. We then measure the particles that we have blasted out. This is secondary ion mass spectrometry or SIMS.

Recently I have also expanded into looking at other volatile elements such as C, N and maybe (if we can sort it out) noble gases. So that is all new and exciting.

One of the great things about this job is there is no typical day! My hours are flexible as long as my work is done, sometimes I might be in the lab all day taking images or making measurements on one of the many different instruments I use, others I might be sitting at my desk furiously typing to try to get my work ready to present to other scientists at a conference. There can be quite a bit of reading or data analysis (both are unfortunate but necessary parts of science) but it usually comes in waves before and after lab work.

A lot of the time I have random little jobs to do or problems to work out how to solve. Most days are a mixture of all of the above, or sometimes I get to go to interesting events, do talks, meet other interesting people and everything else between.

I cannot however start a day without a cup of tea, and need regular refueling throughout the day!