Nathalie Cabrol

That's funny because there was not really a job application.

In fact, when you're a scientist, you have questions in your mind and you have hypotheses and you start to list the kind of thing you need to answer.

And then when you see the kind of thing you have to answer, then you...

Kind of know the places where you need to go to do that.

As far as science is concerned, I started with analyzing data from the Mars missions.

And I had written a PhD about water on Mars, first looking at channels and the history evolution of water.

But then...

During my postdoc, I started to look where that water was ponding.

Interestingly enough, everybody was about channels and water and whether catastrophic or whatnot or seepage.

But when you are talking about ponding water, like lakes or ocean, people started waving

their arms a little bit.

So it was a little bit of a battle, interestingly enough, yeah.

But that got us on track with my husband.

We were working together and we started developing the idea, the concept of lakes in impact craters.

So why in impact craters?

Just because the Viking mission at the time, which is what we were working with,

The resolution and the topography were so poor that there was really no way of telling where you had a real low in the topography.

The only thing you knew was a hole in the ground was an impact crater.

So when you saw valleys.

The Viking mission landed on Mars in 1976, and there were two landers and two orbiters.