Nathalie Cabrol

It was a discretionary fund.

And this is how I got started in my career.

Well, we've gone a long way.

Remember from the Viking where we had no resolution.

Well, we had a little bit more resolution than with Mariner.

It was really the exploration, like your first look at a planet.

You have to remember that the first mission that successfully snapped some pictures of Mars was Mariner 4.

And then everybody at that time was still under the spell of, you know, edge wells and the idea that Mars looked with telescope so similar to the Earth.

Polar caps, we could see them with a telescope and we knew it had season.

the actual tilt is pretty much the same as the one for Earth.

So when Mariner 4 left, everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people thought that we were city, crystal cities and domes and stuff, that another civilization might have evolved in parallel to us in the solar system.

And of course, when the first images came back and Mars looked with that kind of resolution it had, like the moon, it was a huge disappointment.

Then Mariner 9,

And that changed everything.

There was a little bit of drama because Mars started one of the biggest dust storms it ever experienced.

And so for three months, we had an orbiter circling around Mars and not seeing anything.

But then when the dust cleared, all of a sudden, we started discovering volcanoes, valleys, ancient channels, dune fields, polar caps.

And see, when I'm talking to you, I don't need to invent any words to describe Mars.

And although the myth of extraterrestrial civilization on Mars was gone, all of a sudden,

the imagination of the scientists started to pick up because right away we were seeing something that was familiar that we could describe.