Penelope Boston Quotations

My overall fossil-hunting bias is heavily weighted to natural caves and fissures and overhangs. I know from personal experience how these environments serve as both original home for organisms and as great places to preserve the evidence.

The way communal insects behave with respect to each other produces very elaborate, complex behavior of the total, but the actual rules that any individual uses to relate to its fellows can be very simple. The critical thing is how does the swarm behave? Can we direct the individuals enough that the overall motion of the entire swarm is in the direction we want to proceed?

With adequate funding, we think we could do this in six or seven years.

I think we'll come out of this with unique technology and units that we can test in the lava tube caves here. We've already done some testing to look at the size of the units and how they would bounce on a rugged surface.

The best thing about these places is that large -- as in macroscopic -- buried fossilized material is usually weathering out of the outcrops. One can see them laying about and follow the fragments to the source. For microscopic fossils, of course, no clear obvious clues are usually present. The exception is large scale microbial mats like those that made stromatolites and algal travertiles and tufa.

That kind of a no-doubt-about-it pond with minimal shallow excavation could be a goldmine of microfossil material! I'd want to sample its beautiful rims ... and do a small core down through the middle somewhere.

On Earth, the bottoms of these cracks can house organisms in a much more pleasant environment than the surface at large. Obviously, if such communities thrive or thrived on Mars, some of the evidence may well be at the bottom of these cracks. We have much imaging evidence of these terrains on Mars for comparison to the similar terrains here on Earth, not just at the poles but many other high latitude and high altitude places.

The instruments to study the surface would be different that if you were aiming at a lava tube. They have to be big enough to carry the kind of fuel cell that can power their systems, but not be too small that they get wedged into everything.

The individual units are very cute and very adorable. But the function of them as an ensemble is where the real strategy lies.

We'll be looking at Earth from the outside, looking at how we study our own planet.