Dr Queenie Chan, Royal Holloway, University of London
It is not easy to catch a shooting star, but when we find one, we make the most out of it by studying it in every detail to learn its secrets. Although the building blocks of life in meteorites could be vulnerable to extreme conditions, e.g. toasty temperature during a meteorite’s fiery entry into the atmosphere, the interiors of meteorites are buffered from those conditions. Trapped liquid water and life’s precursor molecules could have been preserved like “mosquito in amber” and therefore studied in the laboratory.
Queenie Chan is a planetary scientist. Her work involves the analysis of the chemical and organic contents of astromaterials including meteorites and asteroidal/cometary samples returned by space missions. In this talk, she will discuss how water and life’s simple building blocks were delivered to the early Earth.
Queenie completed her PhD in Planetary Science at Imperial College in 2011, and undertook post-doctoral assignments at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and NASA Johnson Space Center. Until 2020 she was with the Open University and has recently been appointed Technology Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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