Life on campus. Life on Mars? Dr. Heidi Manning divides her time between two worlds.
The first is familiar. For the past 20 years, the astrophysicist has been part of Concordia College’s four-member Department of Physics, teaching classes in all levels of the subject as well as astronomy.
The second? The sky’s the limit. Her scientific inquiries have taken her far beyond Moorhead to work with colleagues in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, exploring the solar system’s greatest questions via the Cassini space probe to Saturn and the Curiosity rover still gathering data on the planet Mars.
“I love interacting with students here on campus,” the brilliant, personable scientist reports. “Helping them see and explore the world around them is exciting – training them to think critically about science.” She’s helping develop a new major in astrophysics. Her favorite assignment, though, may be the astronomy classes she teaches for non-science majors: “It’s fun to inspire their interest in the stars.”
Her own path to space led her from her home town, Fergus Falls, to Gustavus Adolphus College, where she earned her undergraduate degree in physics. She went on to advanced study at the University of Minnesota with the idea of teaching at a small liberal arts school not so different from her alma mater.
As part of her fellowship, she had the chance to conduct research with a faculty member before starting classes. “They told me about a faculty member who was working on a project that would be flown on the space shuttle. Was I interested?” Well, yes.
Starting in 1990, she worked on development and calibration of a mass spectrometer destined for the space mission – a device that measures and categorizes the chemical molecules in a sample of gas. After completing her thesis in 1995, she was interviewing for a teaching job in Wisconsin when another opportunity opened up: a two-year postdoctoral assignment with NASA, working on a team developing a similar instrument for the Mars Science Laboratory, better known as the Curiosity rover.
“I was torn. After all, it was a tenure-track teaching position,” she says. “My husband David, who’s a very wise man, told me, ‘Life is made up of stories. Which will give you the best story?’” She adds, “I’ve always taken that advice to heart.”
Her choice was clear. She set off for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to spend the next two years as part of the team testing and calibrating two mass spectrometers destined for the Cassini probe of Saturn. But Heidi wasn’t on hand to see the climactic moment when Cassini began its seven-year voyage from Cape Canaveral in October 1997. By then, she was in her second month teaching physics classes at Concordia.
The Cassini probe finally entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 – coinciding with Heidi’s first sabbatical and giving her time to work on the data it was sending back to earth.
Two later, when NASA scientists were just starting testing and development of an instrument they proposed to send to Mars, they invited her back to Goddard. “Our kids were 6 and 9. My husband quit his job and we moved the family out to Maryland for the summer,” she says. “I worked at the center, and he and the kids learned everything about American history exploring the area between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.”
Her team was working on SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars. It sniffs and analyzes the Martian atmosphere looking for clues to the planet’s deep history … ultimately contributing to an answer to the question of whether the Red Planet has had what’s required to support microbial life.
The Rover – with SAM aboard — landed on Mars in August 2012, just as Heidi’s second sabbatical started. During that heady year, she rotated between Goddard, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and her home in Moorhead, analyzing the atmospheric data beamed back to earth.
The size of the project stretches the imagination. Some $2.5 billion has been invested in Curiosity. Five thousand scientists and engineers have worked on it. The sturdy little Rover is still plugging away across the landscape of the Gale Crater, now in its second extended mission.
Today Heidi’s husband is director of finance for the Concordia Language Villages. Their older son is majoring in physics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. Their younger boy – a high school junior who went through Moorhead’s unique Spanish Immersion Program in elementary school – is an exchange student in Argentina.
Heidi continues her analysis of Curiosity data beamed from Mars, along with two dozen fellow scientists working in locations from France and California to Mexico and Hawaii. “I deal with atmosphere,” she explains. “Our goal is to understand its composition and how it has changed over geological time. What clues does it give us about how Mars used to be?”
That’s a vital question. The fourth planet from the sun – so dusty, cold and seemingly lifeless today –was once far wetter, warmer, more Earth-like. Scientists believe the solar wind tore away most of its atmosphere more than 3 billion years ago, leaving it with air pressure too faint to sustain liquid on its surface. But evidence points to water or ice remaining underground. And that’s enticing because, she explains, “here on earth, no matter where we look, evenin the tiniest drop of water, we find something alive.”
What NASA scientists learn from Mars may illuminate the search for other life as well. Last week NASA announced its Spitzer Space Telescope has identified seven planets in the habitable zone around a dwarf star called Trappist-1 – the latest possibilities in the searchfor life elsewhere in the universe.
“We’re still asking the age-old question – are we alone?” Heidi muses. “How easily does life evolve? What conditions are needed for life to arise? Is life on Earth so unique that it could never happen elsewhere?”
The cosmic questions challenge both science and religion. Heidi says, “That’s why this is a good place for these studies. Concordia is a liberal arts campus where inquiry fits very well – ‘liberal’ in the sense of liberating us to delve deeply into all aspects of creation.
“The scientist asks different questions than the theologian, but we aren’t capable of answering the larger questions of why and who. Those are for other parts of this campus to address. Together, we can form a very broad and deep understanding of our world.”
