Lynn Carter

So they're very close to each other.

So in a way, we'll be sampling the same types of rocks.

But the landing sites are sort of different.

So Northeast Sirtis is this beautiful, almost Monument Valley mesas, except not that big, really.

Here's a diagram of one of the mesas.

So this is 5 meters by 100 meters.

and so the ability to even land amid all this terrain is being made possible by the fact that JPL has developed a new landing system which will be more precise so it's sort of this incredible terrain and what we would want to do here is sample these olivine carbonates so on earth carbonates are often associated with life here we think these carbonates may have been formed and associated with the volcanics

So they might not be biological.

In fact, the going assumption is that they're not.

But it's definitely interesting.

And it's something that's new and that we don't really have any evidence for.

All of these rocks are really old.

So they're from the time period when the valley networks were forming.

So it's a time in Mars history that we've never sent anything that's someplace that's this old before.

One of the things about the Northeast Sirtis site is that people think it's a good place to look because you've shaved off these mesas to look at hydrothermal systems because it looks like those carbonates may have been formed through water interaction in rock.

So it might have been a situation like this at one time.

And this is a picture that National Geographic made for this site in particular, that this is the picture that people sort of have for what it could have been like.

So it looks totally different than this now, but that was billions of years ago.

Another thing that I think is really interesting that I hadn't thought about before I started working on this is this mega breccia, the possibilities of these mega breccias.

So when you have impacts, they throw out huge blocks of material.