Space Rocks and Professor Gretchen Benedix’s Soul
The day is overcast. I’m standing outside Mallokup, a café on Curtin Campus in Bentley near the science and technology delivery areas. I’m meeting Professor Gretchen Benedix, a founder of the Curtin University Space Science and Technology Centre. Her LinkedIn shares her professional life, experience and discoveries. The Professor has a massive presence in academia across the globe, and even into space.
Her aura is so intense that I know her when I see her. Though she is busy, I introduce myself. This woman, whose passion is space rocks, pulls me into her atmosphere, like I am a meteorite, and she is a planet.
Intergalactic Love Story
Gretchen fell in love with space by accident, as an undergraduate student when she took astronomy as an elective. There, her class went to an observatory. She saw Saturn through a telescope. To her, it seemed as if ‘somebody just put in a picture at the end of the telescope.’ It was then she fell in love with space, launching her career arc beyond planetary boundaries. It wasn’t until later, during her postgrad, that she found her obsession—meteorites.
It seemed as if somebody just put in a picture at the end of the telescope!
The defining moment arrived when she started her master’s degree. ‘I did an internship that let me interact with Sally Ride, who was the first U.S. woman astronaut. I helped her collate media for her physics classes. The media was her home movies from being in space on the shuttle. That was formative. Then, I had another internship where I was looking at asteroids and trying to understand how we connect asteroids to meteorites. That was when the whole love of space rocks came through. After that, I did a PhD. I’ve been doing space rocks pretty much since then.’
Antarctic Antics
Gretchen has travelled from the middle of the US to the coast, to Europe and even to Antarctica. It was there, in the frozen wasteland of the South pole, where she combatted the blistering cold to hunt meteorites. Her eyes light up as she speaks on this experience. ‘Meteorites just lay there on the ice and do nothing. All you have to do is open your eyes and look around. Hunting meteorites in Antarctica is an awesome experience. It’s awesome in both senses of the word awesome. As in super, super cool, and I am in awe that this is scary and hard, and I might not make it.’
‘The ice is vast,’ she says with a wistful expression. ‘Meteorites can hide in a bunch of different places. I’ve been to an area where there were no terrestrial rocks at all. Any rock you saw was meteorite, which was absolutely fantastic! And then I’ve been to the places where you’re chucking through all the rocks, which I now know are the same rocks that we have here in Australia.’ Meteorite hunting is not easy. Gretchen explains the procedure further.
‘Once you find a meteorite, there’s a procedure. You get four people around the rock and somebody’s digging a hole because you’ve got to plant a flag. Someone’s looking at the next tag that you have to put into the meteorite because you need a field number. Someone’s recording what the GPS coordinates are for each meteorite.
There was the day we found the strewn field. A strewn field is when a meteorite falls in one area, but it’s all different pieces. The other four people in the team are just kind of milling about. And one of them goes, ‘I got one over here.’ You walk a little bit, and you find the next one. For five days, we harvested this one meteorite. That was exciting.’
We wrap up the discussion on Antarctica about the challenges of keeping the feet dry during fieldwork. Her feet sweat and when they do they soak her socks. The next time she heads off to Antarctica she’ll put 42 pairs of socks and all her M&Ms in a box and ship it to herself so she can endure the minus degrees in relative comfort as she combs the terrain for alien rocks.
Layman’s Terms
We dive into making science available for lay people. This is a vital skill for scientists, researchers, academics and developers to understand, because people want to understand space. Gretchen is skilled at breaking down complex concepts for the average person to understand. ‘I try to find everyday analogies. When I’m talking about how we figure out what the surface of an asteroid is made of, I talk about how sunlight is reflected off the surface. Most people understand the electromagnetic spectrum, right? We get different colours because it’s different kind of energies and wavelengths.’
Using a chair, she explains that material of a chair is absorbing various wavelengths, except for one, which gives us the reflection. That reflection is the visible colour. This helps her explain to people how they discover the materials that an asteroid is made of. ‘We’re separating out the sunlight as the asteroid is acting like a prism. The asteroid separates colours based on what it’s made of.’ This is incredible because it leads into how, as a geoscientist, they discover the origins of space objects which reveals the evolution of our solar system. All that from light!
Misconceptions
As a geoscientist, she’s come up against some huge misconceptions. What is the biggest? Remember Han Solo flitting the Millenium Falcon through the asteroid belt in The Empire Strikes Back. The reality is that there is a lot of space in space. It would be extremely hard to have to avoid hitting any objects—i.e. if you want to hit an asteroid you have to aim for it.
The other misconception she’s come up against was one that left me befuddled beyond belief. ‘The other one that really, really, really gets me is you have to know the difference between the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. I’ve had reporters say that the solar system is the universe.’
Are you kidding me?
‘No.’
SSTC Connection
Gretchen doesn’t kid when it comes to space. She is a founding member of the Curtin University Space Science and Technology Centre. The SSTC is a serious centre for planetary science and space exploration. ‘I was always going to be associated with anything spacey at Curtin. I am a founding member because I was here when SSTC started. We built it around what we were already doing.’
Two of SSTC’s specialities are impact cratering and meteorite characterisation. There is a team of geoscientists dedicated to hunting meteorites and getting to know them in an intimate way. Space objects, including meteorites, create impact craters on planets and moons because they are travelling at high speeds well over 4 kilometres per second. Geoscientists study impact craters on Earth, Moon and other solar system objects to gain an understanding of our solar system’s evolution. Geoscientists characterise found meteorites to also understand more about the evolution of our solar system. To characterise meteorites, scientists consider the path travelled before impact and perform chemical analysis. Geoscientists then create meteor profiles. The profile involves where the meteorites are from, what path they took and what their DNA is.
Asteroid Alter
What is an interstellar geoscientist without at least one object floating around in space named after them? ‘There’s a committee called the International Astronomical Union. They have designed rules and regulations for the naming of astronomical objects.’ For instance, ‘the big valleys on Mars have names that mean Mars or the word ‘star’ in different languages of the world, which is kind of cool.’ For asteroids, the convention was initially names from mythology, but at some point, the names of Gods, Goddesses and other mythical and mysterious beings were bound to run out.
‘One of my colleagues started working with someone who was an asteroid observer. He found a crap load of asteroids. It’s the asteroid discoverer’s right to suggest names for all of those. My colleague said it would be nice to recognise the people who have contributed to the study of asteroids through the study of meteorites. That got started in like the early 2000s. Eventually, they nominated me.’
Gretchen glances at her watch—another appointment awaits, which is no surprise for a geoscientist of her calibre. I’m grateful for the time she shared; interviews like this help make science accessible. I click off my recorder as she heads off to her next interstellar engagement in the ever-expanding Curtin universe.
Written by Louise Kaestner, 2025. For more, visit LinkedIn or head to her website: https://www.louisekaestnerwriter.com/