Tracy Drain

And it had a bunch of instruments on it in order to examine the atmosphere and to examine the surface.

And some of the things that I thought were particularly cool are the images that it's taken of these...

If you imagine a wall of a crater that had rivulets that almost look like the tracks of water may have been going down inside.

And because I've been off that mission for a very long time, I do not remember if they determined whether those were really streaks of briny water or if they were very, very fine sand that had been disturbed by the winds and then flowed down and made patterns like that.

But I know that they have seen...

Lots of evidence, as previous orbiters did too, of ice at the poles.

People always say, well, is there ice on Mars?

Well, scientists know there definitely is at the poles, carbon dioxide ice and also water ice.

But one of the things that people are interested in is how much ice there might be closer to the equator where it's easier to land heavy things like people with payloads.

Actually, no.

This might be me getting a little bit too old.

I have no desire to go out there.

Super happy to have other people go and build a spacecraft to go take instruments there.

That is such a fantastic spacecraft.

Its whole job was to go and find exoplanets, which are other planets inside our galaxy outside of our solar system.

around other stars.

And the way that it did this was very elegant.

There are lots of different ways that you can detect other planets, but the way Kepler does it is by looking at the light coming from a star, and if you detect a very faint dimming of that light, and if that dimming happens at a repeatable frequency...

Something's passing between the Kepler Space Telescope and the star.

And if it's a repeatable frequency, then that could be a planet or it could be a companion star.