Public lecture - Bringing Mars into 2020

This lecture is sponsored by the St. Louis Astronomical Society

 

Abstract:  Building on a heritage of over 20 years of robotics exploration on the surface of Mars, NASA is preparing for the next step in martian exploration, the 2020 Mars rover. The last four Mars rovers have made ground breaking discoveries in NASA's campaign to "follow the water," and through their work we now know that Mars was once warm and wet enough to have liquid water, rivers and lakes, at its surface. Now we are ready to take the next step. Mars 2020 will not only search for signs ancient habitable conditions on Mars, but will also directly search for signs of past microbial life. Mars 2020 is also the first step in the holy grail of Mars science, sample return! The rover will drill and collect rock cores as it drives around and cache them for a future mission to pick up, load into a rocket, and return to Earth.

 

I'm a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow and PhD candidate in Washington University in St. Louis' Earth and Planetary Science Department, where my dissertation research focuses on analyzing geochemical data returned from past and present Mars rover missions. I have spent the last two summers working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. While there I worked as a systems engineer on various aspects of the 2020 Mars rover, and in hazard assessment of potential landing sites for 2020.