Moroccan scientist Asmaa Boujibar, an Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at Western Washington University (WWU) in Bellingham, Washington State, in northwestern United States, has received a two-year $300,000 grant from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to explore the elemental makeup of the planet Mercury, according to a university press release.
While planet Mars has been studied extensively throughout the years and researchers have obtained a lot of valuable data about it through advanced rovers, Mercury is still largely unexplored, making it an exciting frontier for scientific inquiry. Boujibar is seeking to answer questions surrounding the “mysterious” planet’s composition, geological features, and evolutionary history.
“We know a lot more about Mars than any other planet beyond Earth, thanks to data from rovers and Martian meteorites that have fallen on Earth,” Boujibar said. “But for Mercury, we must work with laboratory simulations and remote sensing. All the work we do in my lab can only be based on remote sensing data, and a huge majority of that has come from the spacecraft Messenger.”
She said she is able to reproduce in her laboratory the same chemistry, pressures, and temperatures found on Mercury. “The high-pressure, high-temperature laboratory enables us to simulate the interior of planets, including Earth. So, we basically combine data from the surface with experiments to figure out what the interior might look like and construct a full picture of what the planet is made of, all the way to the core,” the researcher explained.
Boujibar and her team will use data from NASA’s Messenger probe, which orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, to investigate the geological history, current status, and future prospects for what astronomers call “the Swift Planet.”
The Messenger probe spacecraft was launched by NASA in 2004. It spent four years orbiting the planet Mercury from 2011 to 2015, and during its mission, it transmitted a wealth of new information and detailed maps of Mercury’s surface helping scientists to learn more about the planet’s geology and composition. However, after completing its mission, Messenger lost its orbit or path and crashed onto Mercury’s surface. Despite its demise, the probe’s discoveries continue to contribute to the understanding of the solar system.
“We are using laboratory data and what we know of Mercury’s geochemistry from the Messenger spacecraft to see what they can tell us about the formation of the planet,” she said.
She added that the data released from the spacecraft revealed “interesting correlations between many aspects of the physics and chemistry of the planet, such as the topography, chemical composition, age, magnetic and gravity field.”
Among other things, the NASA grant will enable students to tackle the complex patterns observed on Mercury’s surface by employing artificial intelligence, according to WWU’s release. “Now, with machine learning, we can process this vast dataset and uncover hidden patterns using traditional mathematical techniques.” The grant will also provide funding for several paid summer research positions for graduate and undergraduate students in her laboratory. These opportunities will complement the existing team’s efforts in uncovering Mercury’s hidden secrets.
Boujibar thinks the research project is very timely, as it coincides with the launch of the BepiColombo spacecraft, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
BepiColombo will begin orbiting Mercury in December 2025. Boujibar’s research findings will offer new hypotheses that can be tested with the data to be collected by the BepiColombo mission.
Boujibar joined WWU in 2022. Having grown up in Casablanca, as a passionate researcher of space exploration, Asmaa earned her Ph.D. from the University of Clermont Auvergne in France in 2014. While pursuing her doctorate, she was admitted to a team of NASA researchers in the same year, making her the first Moroccan woman to work for the American aerospace agency. After completing her Ph.D., Asmaa held a postdoctoral position at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, for two years.