An Underground Look at Mars Climate and Evolution by Lynn Carter - October 4, 2017

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2017 LPL Evening Lectures 1h 6m 3 speakers 4 chapters transcribed

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What is the background of the speaker and their role in Mars research?

Chris 0:00

I had a chance to meet her a number of years ago when I was at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and that's where she has spent quite a bit of her time. But initially, her undergraduate degree was in sciences at the University of Illinois, and then she did a master's and a PhD at Cornell University in astronomy. Um, after that, she did, uh, post-doc at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and then, uh, began working as a research scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. And that's, uh, for those of you that, uh, know it as a fantastic place. For those of you that don't, it's-it's really is an extraordinary, uh, place, uh, for space sciences research. It has almost 10,000 people that work there.

Chris 0:41

It, uh, basically is, uh, involved in just about every space mission that, uh, takes place in-in the United States. Over the time that she was there working with NASA, she received a number of different awards, including a fellowship for early career researchers and planetary sciences, group achievement awards for SHRAD, which is a ground-penetrating radar for Mars, which you'll hear more about this evening, as well as an early career, uh, achievement medal. Um, she's worked on a number of different spacecraft missions, uh, SHRAD, which I- I mentioned, but also, uh, the MiniRF, uh, science instrument, which is, uh, a radar, uh, instrument, uh, uh, for the, uh, the moon. Um, and has worked on a number of other, uh, Mars-related, uh, missions, uh, including the RIMFAX radar, which is a ground-penetrating radar for the upcoming Mars 2020 rover.

Chris 1:33

Um, the Reason radar, which is for a very exciting flagship mission to, uh, the Jupiter system, and particularly to Europa. Um, she also serves now as the Deputy PI for the Mini-RF, uh, instrument. This is, um, that, uh, uh, radar for, for the Moon that I mentioned before on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. and is a co-investigator on a joint venture with an international partnership with CREA, an instrument called ShadowCam. So in addition to all these fantastic mission opportunities, she is a fantastic scientist that has worked on not only the Earth and Mars and Europa, as I mentioned, but the Moon and also the very veiled planet of Venus, which is where a lot of her PhD work came from. So, at this point, I'd like to be able to introduce our speaker, and again, if you have questions at the end, please don't hesitate to put up your hand.

Chris 2:24

We'd like to be able to hear your questions as well. Thank you.

Lynn Carter 2:35

Okay. Hello, everyone, and thank you, Chris, for that very good introduction. I'm really happy to be here tonight to talk to you about radars and Mars climate and how we're using radars to look at the stratigraphy of Mars to understand the climate better. U of A is really famous for the HiRISE instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. That's the instrument that provides tons of beautiful pictures. There's some of them around the building. And many of you may have been to talks by Alfred McEwen and other people on the HiRISE team showing these gorgeous pictures, very high resolution. So I work on a different instrument on that same spacecraft mission. And it's a radar, not an optical image. So I'm really excited to talk to you about this different way of looking at the surface.

Lynn Carter 3:17

I think it's a way that people don't often know about and they haven't often spent a lot of time thinking about this instrument. And so I'm really excited to talk to you about it tonight. So Mars climate is the big reason that we send so many spacecraft to Mars. Looking back through Mars history, when we look at the old terrains on Mars, we can see evidence for these valley networks, and we think there was flowing water on the surface of Mars billions of years ago. Of course, when we see evidence of flowing water, everyone thinks there could have been life, or it could have been a habitable environment. Even as Mars got older and it lost a lot of its atmosphere, we still see evidence that there was a lot of running water on Mars.

Lynn Carter 3:58

So there's these big outflow channels.