Lynn Carter

Okay.

Hello, everyone, and thank you, Chris, for that very good introduction.

I'm really happy to be here tonight to talk to you about radars and Mars climate and how we're using radars to look at the stratigraphy of Mars to understand the climate better.

U of A is really famous for the HiRISE instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

That's the instrument that provides tons of beautiful pictures.

There's some of them around the building.

And many of you may have been to talks by Alfred McEwen and other people on the HiRISE team showing these gorgeous pictures, very high resolution.

So I work on a different instrument on that same spacecraft mission.

And it's a radar, not an optical image.

So I'm really excited to talk to you about this different way of looking at the surface.

I think it's a way that people don't often know about and they haven't often spent a lot of time thinking about this instrument.

And so I'm really excited to talk to you about it tonight.

So Mars climate is the big reason that we send so many spacecraft to Mars.

Looking back through Mars history, when we look at the old terrains on Mars, we can see evidence for these valley networks, and we think there was flowing water on the surface of Mars billions of years ago.

Of course, when we see evidence of flowing water, everyone thinks there could have been life, or it could have been a habitable environment.

Even as Mars got older and it lost a lot of its atmosphere, we still see evidence that there was a lot of running water on Mars.

So there's these big outflow channels.

So even moving to like a billion years ago, which is more recent in the Mars history, we still see evidence of liquid water occasionally on the surface of Mars and occasionally a lot of water.

Mars also has a lot of crater, impact craters that have been filled in with water.

that could have provided lakes where organisms could have grown.