Lynn Carter

So that suggests that, again, that the pole is pretty young, the ice is pretty young, because that surface that's underneath it is basically the same age as the surrounding surfaces.

It's not like putting the ice cap there hasn't really shielded it from a lot of cratering.

So the ice cap must be pretty young for that situation to actually be true.

And so this has also allowed us to more date the polarize caps than we were able to do before.

Another kind of cool thing is that we can now do these fly throughs of the polar cap.

So let me see if I can.

So we have this 3D volume and you can actually just sort of fly

through and like pieces of the cap come and go.

And you can see the layering change as you go across the pole.

Some of the layering is remarkable in that it goes across almost the whole pole.

And I mean, that's like hundreds of kilometers, but those layers are very flat and they're very consistent across the pole.

Other times you see layers kind of pinch out as you go back and forth.

This is the giant hole in the data because the orbits does not go over the North Pole exactly.

But it's pretty fun that you could go to Mars, and you wouldn't know what's in there.

And here we have enough data that you can just fly through the pole back and forth across the image.

And then here's a sand dunes.

They're really rough, so you get all these artifacts on the top.

So it's been pretty fun to be able to do this and to have enough data, really.

And one of the advantages of having a mission that's gone on for as long as Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is that we actually have this data.

There's always this trade-off in planetary science, like do you want to get a new mission there or do you want to pay for the mission that's already there?