Lynn Carter

But there are a number of big volcanoes on Mars.

So we're just not sure which ones it came from.

So like I said, what we're trying to do now is get enough data to be able to reconstruct the history of that region in a 3D way, like what we can do with the polar caps.

But we don't have quite enough data for that yet.

All right, so then I wanted to spend just a few more minutes at the end of the talk talking about the future of radars and particularly the Mars 2020 mission, which is going to have a radar on it.

So Mars 2020, this is a little picture of it here, is a rover that NASA is going to launch in 2020 and then it will arrive in February 2021.

And the main purpose of this rover is to do sampling.

So the goal is to send it someplace that's really old to find a habitable environment and to look for biosignatures.

So it's got a sampling arm on it.

It'll actually drill cores.

And the goal is that it will collect all these cores.

And then it's going to put them on the ground

and then we're going to send another spacecraft which is going to pick them all up and then we're going to bring them back to the Earth.

So this is like step one in Mars sample return.

None of the other steps have been planned other than this step where you get the cores and put them on the surface.

So we're not entirely sure what's going to happen besides that part.

But the radar will be very capable.

It'll be a lot different, even though the base of it looks like the Curiosity rover, the instruments that are on it are a lot different, because the assumption here was that we're gonna bring the samples back to Earth.

So we don't need to do this sort of chemistry set analysis that the Curiosity radar does, or rover does.

So they're mostly remote sensing instruments.