Lynn Carter

And the most important job for the instruments

the rover is going to be to characterize the environment.

Because whenever you take samples and you want to analyze them in a lab, it's very important to know where they came from and what that surrounding environment was and the geologic context of them.

And so these instruments were really selected to develop that context.

And so the RIMFAX radar,

is on the back and so we were selected to look at the subsurface in this profiling mode.

RIMFAX will have higher resolution than Chirad and Marsis and it'll be more like the systems that people use for archaeology on the earth that you pull by hand and except this one will be remotely operated on a rover.

And so then whenever the rover's driving, we're pinging the surface like this, and then it's the same thing where whenever the radar wave hits an interface in the stratigraphy, we'll see an echo back from it.

So then we'll be able to, you know, as the rover's going along, see what's underneath the surface.

And a major reason why people wanted to have a radar on this was because they realized with the other rovers that they had this problem

where they would see a unit and it looked really exciting and so they would be sampling it or looking at it or whatever then they would drive off and they often had no idea how that unit connected to what they went to next because Mars is very dusty, units can be dipping, maybe you don't see where that unit went and so what they're hoping is that with this system we will be able to track those units so that if you sample one unit or look at one unit

then you drive off, you can see that, oh, it went under this, or like, oh, it's part of this other piece of the stratigraphy, which is context that we didn't have before ever.

RIMFAX, I think, now will be the first GPR on Mars.

So the Europeans are going to send an instrument as well,

but now it looks like they've been delayed so long that we might actually arrive first, not that it's a competition.

But, and actually like our principal investigator, he's Norwegian, Sven-Erik Cameron, and this radar is being provided by the Norwegian Defense Research Agency.

But he was actually on the other one too, and now he's happy he won this one in the competition because it's probably going to get there first.

But he's associated with both of them, so it's lucky for him.

So this is the frequency that we're operating at, 115 megahertz to 1.2 gigahertz.

Basically, the wavelength's a lot shorter.