Meet the Fellows
Research Experiences: Michael Russell
Michael Russell, Ph.D., an astrobiologist from Glasgow, Scotland, sought to amuse his young son Andy one night by using Andy’s chemistry set to form intriguing silica gardens. As Andy broke apart some of the crystals he exclaimed, “Hey, Dad! These things are hollow!”
Inadvertently, Andy had helped Russell better understand why 350 million-year-old rocks that the researcher had recovered earlier from an Irish zinc mine also proved hollow. Andy’s crystals thus gave Russell a basis for his research performed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Ca.
The 1963 London University graduate, who received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Durham, has worked since 2006 under a three-year Fellowship appointment in the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP), administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU).
The NPP Fellowship allows Russell to delve into an ageless quest—seeking life’s origins on earth, and perhaps on other planets and their satellites. Research eventually could help NASA determine whether earth alone supports life in the universe.
“Those columns, chimneys and bubbles [in the Irish zinc rocks],” Russell said, “were made of iron sulfide. They must’ve once been natural chemical gardens that could’ve acted as inorganic membranes for the first cells.”
He explained that formations “might have occurred back when warm, alkaline-spring water—rich with sulfide ions—met acidic seawater laced with iron from black smoker vents” erupting beneath oceans on an ancient earth.
Russell sees serious space-travel implications in ascertaining how and why life originates on sunlit, wet, rocky planets.
“I’ve designed and built chemical reactors to simulate conditions early in the history of such planets,” he said. Research may validate his hypothesis—that “life emerges at warm, alkaline springs beneath the ocean in response to a tension between atmospheric carbon dioxide, dissolved in an ocean, and hydrothermal hydrogen in otherwise inorganic conditions. If experiments support that hypothesis, it will feed into planetary exploration.”
At JPL, Russell and colleagues maintain hydrothermal reactor experiments 24/7 and contemplate such prospects as life on Jupiter’s huge moon, Europa.
“It’s simple to outline how life originated,” Russell said. “But it’s complex to detail. Life didn’t arise by simple rearrangement of organic molecules on the planet’s surface, but by organic molecules produced from solutions containing simple reactive precursors—one from a hot spring bearing hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide; the other, oceanic with dissolved CO2, nitric oxide, phosphate and iron, nickel and zinc ions. These conditions supply energy necessary for life to emerge.”
NASA research also helps Russell better understand dark energy; global warming; Jovian moons’ structure; and data gleaned from NASA’s Cassini mission to investigate Saturn’s moons. Russell called it a privilege “to research without interruptions, while interacting with brilliant colleagues.”
The NASA Fellowship allowed Russell to apply “theory developed [from] past geological and geochemical surveys to help plan life-detection programs, particularly for Mars and Europa.” JPL’s intellectual environment, he added, let him publish ten research papers internationally in two years.
“And ORAU staff are exceptional at helping guide foreign nationals through intricacies of living and working in the U.S.A,” he said. “The experience has been beyond my wildest dreams.”