Lynn Carter

The Curiosity Rover currently now is at Gale Crater.

So they're doing a lot of chemical and mineralogical investigations to try and understand this environment, and they found evidence for long-lived water at Gale Crater.

And so our exploration of Mars has really been focused on looking at the areas where there are water and trying to understand things about how long could water have been present.

Could it have been a habitable environment?

Could things have evolved there?

And how does Mars climate change over time from the very beginning of Mars where the atmosphere was thicker and it was warmer and more clement to the current day where Mars is very dry, it's very cold, the atmosphere is very thin, and it's very hard to have running water on the surface of Mars today.

So some of the questions we're interested in is how does that evolution compare to that of Earth?

Can we learn things from studying those really old terrains on Mars that would tell us things about how

life could have gotten started on Earth.

How long was Mars habitable?

Was it really only habitable when you had this running water on the surface, you know, three billion years ago or something?

Or could there have been pockets of habitability where you might have had habitable environments that only lasted for a very short period of time, but maybe if you had a biosphere early on,

maybe then that could have sort of maintained itself over long periods of time.

And so what processes could have contributed to that?

So for example, volcanism is one that we often talk about.

Like if you have a lot of volcanism going on on Mars, could that have created situations where you had liquid water that was very temporary?

And what are the constraints on habitability for planets like Mars?

So now we can go out, we can use telescopes, and we can find exoplanets of different sizes.

And one of the big questions that people have about exoplanets is, how can you tell whether or not a planet that we find around another star is habitable?

And so really understanding Earth and Mars and Venus in our solar system is how we've