Solar System Origin & Evolution at Imperial

How did dust and gas produce a planet capable of supporting life? This is one of the most fundamental of questions, and engages everyone from school children to scientists. Our planet formed 4.5 billion years ago along with the Sun and the other planets and minor bodies in our Solar System, and it is the only habitable world yet discovered on which life evolved. By understanding the details of how our Solar System formed we can hope to find an answer.

We now know much about how stars and their accompanying planetary systems form in general. We know that stars form by the collapse of interstellar clouds of dust and gas. Planets are constructed in disks known as planetary nebula formed by the rotation of the collapsing gas cloud. It was in the solar nebula, surrounding the young Sun, that all the objects in our Solar System were created through a process called accretion.

There is, however, a long list of details we don't know about how our Solar System formed. Why, for example, are all the planets so different? Why is Venus an inferno with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, Mars a frozen rock with a thin atmosphere, and Earth a haven for life? The answer lies in events that predated the assembly of these planets, it lies in the early history of the nebula and the events that occurred as fine-dust stuck together to form larger objects known as planetesimals, and as those planetesimals changed through collisions, heating and the effects of water to become the building blocks of planets. Our research intends to follow the evolution of planetary materials from the sources of dust prior to solar system formation, through the assembly of precursor objects within the solar nebula to the alteration of these objects as they became planets.

The source of presolar dust provides a context to our solar system. From what types of star was dust derived and how did dust from these different sources mix and change in the solar nebula? These questions can be answered by analysis of isotopes of high temperature, refractory elements, within meteorites - rocks from asteroids that preserve a history of the early solar system. Meteorites, together with cosmic dust particles, also retain the fine-dust particles from the solar nebula. These dust grains are smaller than a millionth of a metre but modern microanalysis can expose their minerals and compositions. We will study the fine-grained components of meteorites and cosmic dust to investigate how fine-dust began accumulating in the solar nebula, how heating by an early hot nebula and repeated short heating events affected aggregates of dust grains, and whether magnetic fields helped control the distribution of dust in the solar nebula.

In addition to the rocky and metallic materials that make up the planets, our research will examine the fate of organic materials that were crucial to the origins of life. Through newly developed methods we can trace this history of organic matter in meteorites from their formation in interstellar space, through the solar nebula and into planetesimals. This research will examine the effect of events also recorded in rocky and metallic fine-dust on the organic components of the early planetary materials from which the first living things on Earth were constructed.

Once the planets finally formed, their materials continued to change. Our research focuses on the planet Mars, which provides a second example of a planetary body on which life could have appeared. We will trace the evolution of water and organics from planetary formation to the present day. Research on landforms on Mars will examine a crucial period in the planet's history, when global climate change transformed the planet into an arid wasteland, to evaluate the opportunity for organisms to adapt and survive. Research on the survival or organic compounds in martian soil will test whether the signature of life can still be detected on the planet.

Public Sector

Widening participation in STEM subjects is a key aim of the Government's Higher Education Policy (Higher Education White Paper, 2011) due to a significant achievement gap between the public and private education sector (CBI 2010). Widening participation across social-economic groups will be achieved through engagement with our inspiring science program and benefits from its accessibility to students in the crucial "crossroads" KS3.0-4.0 group and extensive media coverage. Our outreach strategy (see Impact Plan) evolves existing relationships with the BA, the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, the Natural History Museum, and STFC Science in Society. Highlights include a series of Nature Live Lectures with the Natural History Museum and the Rock Library - an existing resource for students, lecturers, academics and industry.

Private Sector

The private sector will benefit from our technology and methodology development and widened participation in STEM. Spinout will be exploited through Imperial Innovations, the Technology Transfer Office of Imperial College. Our review of knowledge exchange potential with the TTO has identified several areas for implementation:

(a) The application of double spike methods to toxicology. Isotopic tracing methods are being exploited through PROSPECT, a private-public partnership that provides the UK contribution to the OECD Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials (Project A).

(b) Extraction and analysis of organics are applicable to a wide range of environmental, forensic and petrochemical applications (Project C and H). Sephton (PI project C) has an successful track record with the TTO in KE including patents in the areas of forensics and heavy oil extraction (Sephton et al. (2008) Filed: P45622EP).

(c) The iSALE shock physics code (Project E) is an established free-to-use tool whose users include the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermarston. Industry sponsorship collaborations are being developed.

(d) High resolution image analysis of the martian surface (Project F) and soil experiments (Project H) will provide important constraints for spacecraft design. Commercial spacecraft construction is a key UK industry, worth £7.5 billion to the UK economy (UK Space Agency, BIS, 2011).

(e) Camera Network technology (Project G) is being implemented in Australia to record flight trials of hypersonic aerial vehicles (HIFiRE program) resulting in low-cost tracking using ad hoc flexible distributed networks. Bland is working with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) to develop autonomous vehicle searching techniques that have a wide range of applications.

Third Sector

Third sector organisations are important in widening participation in the UK (DfE, DCSF-00699-2009). Our program already engages with the BA, The Royal Institute, Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society (see Impact Plan). We are also involved with amateur societies UK-wide giving ~12 lectures a year. During the grant we expect to contribute to the BA Festival of Science, The RS Summer exhibition and the Science Media Centre (RI).

General Public

The IC Strategy document 2010-2014 states "Imperial College London is committed to engaging with public audiences about the relevance of its research to society. This commitment builds on the skilled and creative ways that Imperial researchers and students already engage with public audiences." Our program of research has a long history of successful engagement activities. Disseminating our research to the public is an important activity and our research results in ~60 media articles a year. PIs also give 7 media interviews per year each and act as advisors on documentaries (e.g. How the Earth was Made, 2007-10). We also have a long standing relationship with the STFC Science in Society (SiS) program including constructing the Lunar Samples Package (M. Genge) on which we will build with a SiS Fellowship application.