Finding life on Mars is a pretty high career goal to set yourself. But the softly spoken and no-frills Brisbane geologist and astrobiologist Dr Abigail Allwood has never thought in those terms.

“I think every step along the way I broke the rules of what you are supposed to do to get where you want to be,” she says. “They say ‘Set your sights on what you want to get and work really hard.’ There was no way I could have ever envisioned I would have ended up working at NASA, and once I did that, no way [I would have] ended up as a principal investigator.”