Katie Stack Morgan

Robots are great because they can test things out ahead of time.

They can decrease the risk, and there is a lot of risk to sending humans to another planet.

And so our robotic explorers can help reduce the risks for human explorers

Mars has so many similarities to Earth, especially Mars billions of years ago, we think was quite similar to Earth.

But it has taken a very different path than Earth.

Mars was once habitable.

It's not anymore.

It's cold and dry.

But yet it has this fascinating rock record that tells us that Mars was once very Earth-like.

So for me, Mars was the perfect marriage of the familiar and the alien and the mysterious.

Yes, so NASA has been on this quest to discover whether Mars, the red planet, was capable of hosting life, whether it did once host life.

Is there life beyond Earth?

And so there is a strategy in place.

And the Pathfinder lander and the Small Sojourner rover and the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity were really looking for water.

They were following the water on Mars.

So not just water, but also the basic ingredients for life, like organic molecules and the environments and conditions in which life could have existed.

And again, the answer was yes.

And so then we wanted to really take it to the next level and say, okay, you know, Mars had water, Mars had habitable environments, did Mars have life?

And in order to answer that question, the Perseverance rover was designed with a new payload, specifically designed to look for signs of possible ancient life in the rock record.

We did not want to have to worry about the wheels and the damage that we might do to the wheels.