Lynn Carter

And these are just a couple of examples of the data.

So how this works is the spacecraft has this track that it flies across.

And then here you can see this is Marsis data of the pole.

And this is Sharad data of one of the polar caps.

And so Marsis goes down farther because you can see interfaces that are deeper than what Sharad can see.

But Sharad is higher resolution because you can see more fine scale layering.

So those are just to give you a picture of the fact that when you change the wavelength, the image that you get out changes.

But we're mostly gonna talk about this one, which has just proved to be more interesting for some reason that we don't really understand.

All right, so I'm gonna show you how Sharad works.

So Sharad, our instrument, is this line that's on the spacecraft.

It's just a thin piece of metal, a metal rod.

When you go to long wavelengths, you can use, this is called a dipole antenna.

It's not directional, so it just radiates power in every direction.

And so it's not like a satellite dish that you would think of having.

It's just a line.

So I can play this video.

So what you're going to see with this video is that as this spacecraft tracks across the surface, the radar pings down to the surface and reflects off of tons of interfaces that are in the subsurface.

So here we are flying across the surface with our dipole antenna and then we start pulsing down into the surface and the radar beams hits the surface and then comes back up and is recorded on the spacecraft.

So here we're crossing the north polar cap of Mars, pinging away, and then we're gonna open up a slice and show what that radar data looks like.

And when this happens, you'll be able to see tons of subsurface interfaces, we call them, or layering,