Lynn Carter

And luckily Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter gets used as a commsat for the rovers.

So nobody wants to get rid of it.

In fact, they want to live for all time.

So it's been great.

We've gotten tons of data, but when you actually are there for a long time and keep collecting data, you can get these data sets that you really can't get unless you spend 10 years there.

So it's pretty fantastic that we've been able to get this.

Hopefully it'll last for a long time because it's also gonna be the relay for the Mars 2020 rover.

So yeah, it's been really fun to see this process happen and be able to fly through the polar cap.

This is the south polar cap.

So I'm not gonna show the fly-through video because it takes a long time.

But basically you can do the same thing.

And again, we can count buried craters

within and underneath this polar ice cap here's the co2 deposits mostly I wanted to show this to show that the carbon dioxide ice looks a lot different to the radar so there's all this layering here which is water ice but then the co2 ice there's not a lot of internal reflections from there for whatever reason and it has different radar properties so mapping this out was actually pretty easy

It was easy to map it out.

We sat there looking at it for like two years and we called these bridges because it looked kind of like there were these bridges and we didn't know what it was.

So everybody basically just was like, yeah, that's pretty unexplainable.

And then one day the US PI for this was like,

I think it's carbon dioxide ice and then when you know that that's true Then it's really easy to figure out from the radar data that that's actually what it is So it's kind of sad that I feel like it's kind of sad that it took us so long to figure it out But that's often the case in science, I guess so So yeah, that's that's some of our data for the polar caps I think that's been one of the most cool things about Sherrod is being able to see all that layering in the ice and go back and look at the climate record and

and see the buried craters and all the layering that happens inside the ice caps.

It's not the only thing we've been able to do with Sharad, though.