Prof. Sam Kounaves from Tufts University, USA visited the department on 24th November to talk about his work with NASA and the Phoenix Mars mission. The talk was titled: “The New Surface Chemistry of Mars: Implications for Habitability and Organics”​.

The talk presented the results of the in-situ martian soil analyses by the electrochemically-based Wet Chem Lab (WCL) on the Phoenix lander and the GC-MS instruments on the Curiosity rover. This was inspiring as Kounaves showed the use of electrochemistry as a tool for getting important information from other planets.