Ball State University junior Krista White was the first to experiment with carbon monoxide at the University of Arkansas in order to simulate the Mars environment and determine if life could survive.
"We wanted her to pioneer our way into CO2 experimentation," Derek Sears, director of the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, said.
While participating in an internship at NASA, White said she used dry ice to mimic the carbon monoxide environment of Mars and specifically focused on the timeline of seasons and evaporation rates of poles on either ends of the red planet.
Her experiments explained the different evaporation rates of the poles and concluded the difference was due to temperature variations, Sears said.
"Mars has always been a fascinating planet and one of the reasons is because in some senses, it's earthlike," Sears said.
The experiments were apart of a 10 week internship sponsored by NASA and offered to 10 of the 130 students that applied.
Lab researcher Vincent Chevrier oversaw White's work on a daily basis and will also be helping her present her research in the coming months.
"She was very, very motivated," he said. "The second day she was there she came with her lab book full of 20 ideas."
As a geology and physics major and astronomy minor, White said she started studying fossils and rocks at a young age and fell in love with astronomy when she was 14 years old.
After her mom bought her a telescope, White began going to star parties to observe the night skies for a set number of days with other groups of people.
"I absolutely love science and math and learning and finding out new things about the universe that we never really knew existed," she said.
During the summer of 2006, White conducted research at Ball State for an internship with Florida's Department of Defense.
For her research, she was chosen as the first Ball State student sent the Kitt Peak Observatory of Tucson, Ariz.
"You can't get enough experience when you're a scientist," she said. "It's something you can't go into a book to learn."
White said after being told she would be unable to get internships as a freshman and sophomore, she felt lucky to have received two internships before her junior year.
"To get so involved so early in my career is definitely a booster to my career and goals," she said.
Beyond academics and internships, however, White said the most enjoyable part of her experience in Arkansas was getting to know the diverse range of other interns. She plans on keeping in contact with the interns she meets for future projects.
"There was a lot of diversity there that I didn't see at Ball State," she said
Half of her fellow interns were from foreign areas, such as Europe, Nigeria and Iraq, she said.
White returned home to Logansport on July 28 and will continue writing the results of her research for publication later this year.
She will also be presenting her work in October for the Division of Planetary Science in Orlando, Fla.
Along with that presentation, she will travel to Houston in March to present at the Lunar Planetary Science Society meeting.
White said she hopes to work for NASA someday and do similar research on planets.
"Anything to do with planets, I am more than happy to do research on," she said. "I got a piece of doing real cutting-edge science."
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