Caroline Smith talks to Jim Al-Khalili about what meteorites and other space rocks reveal about the early solar system and the potential for ancient life on Mars.
Caroline Smith is passionate about space rocks, whether they’re samples collected from the surface of asteroids and the Moon and hopefully Mars one day soon, or meteorites, those alien rock fragments that have survived their fiery descents through our atmosphere to land here on Earth. She is Head of Collections and Principal Curator of Meteorites at the Natural History Museum, home to one of the finest meteorite collections in the world. Her interest in rocks began while wandering the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, as a child, picking up the ones that caught her eye and bashing them with a hammer, hoping to find treasure inside, whether it’s gold, diamonds or dinosaur fossils. Her work today, studying rocks that have landed here on Earth or those still out there in space, is no less ambitious. She analyses their chemical composition looking for tantalising clues that might reveal how our Solar System formed, and potentially the presence of the chemical building blocks necessary for life itself.
