Lynn Carter

So do we see stream beds?

Does it look like there was water in this place for a long time?

And then also, what minerals are there?

What things look like they could be interesting to sample?

And we have a lot of people on our team who study very early Earth life.

And so those people have a very good idea about what types of rocks and what types of minerals you would want to sample that could tell you whether or not there were ever organisms there.

so the Norwegians like to test their equipment on Svalbard this little Norwegian island and so here's an example of our antenna this is what our antenna actually looks like and they drove it over a glacier on these snowmobiles an option that we don't have on Mars and you can see the base of the glacier basically so we're at the point where we're building equipment now which is pretty exciting and at JPL they've got

the descent ring and some of the actual body of the spacecraft built in their high bay.

So it's pretty exciting that we actually have real equipment now.

So where is this thing going?

Well, whenever we want to send a rover somewhere on Mars, a process has been established.

And in this process, the scientific community looks around Mars.

They find places they think are interesting.

And then we have a landing site workshop where everyone gets to fairly present what it is that their idea is for where to go.

So there was a number of these landing site workshops.

And then people vote.

And then people get voted off.

And then that's the end of those sites.

So it's like reality television, except it's with scientists.

So it's pretty hilarious sometimes.