My name is Lynn Carter I'm a research space scientist, and I work with the
Planetary Geodynamics group here at Goddard. I study the geology of planetary
surfaces: the Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus. There's a lot of things you can learn
about the Earth by studying other planets. For example on the Earth we have
a lot of erosive processes. You know, rains, it washes parts of the surface
away, we have plate tectonics, which recycles
the crust. But on other planets those processes don't necessarily occur. So, for
example, when we look at the Moon we're seeing a surface that's much older. We
can use impact cratering on the Moon, to sort of understand how many impacts happen,
the size of the objects that we're hitting each other in the early solar
system. Generally what I would do every day is a variety of things. Like I might
come in and do some image analysis, and then do some writing about our
scientific results. Sometimes I do fieldwork in Hawaii or Arizona. We take a
ground-penetrating radar out and we learn more about lava flows on the Earth.
One of my favorite things is to use radar remote sensing. For example, on Mars
we can use radars to sound all the way to the bottom of Mars' polar caps and see
all of this layering within the polar caps. And on the
Moon we're using it to study impact cratering. Sometimes when an impact
craters form a huge sheet of melt is thrown out. This melted rock flows across
the surface, but then over time it's covered over by stuff from other impacts.
But with the radar it just blows right through all of that and you can see this
beautiful image of the melt flow coming out of the crater. Looking ahead to the
future there are so many different things that we can learn about planetary
science that would be interesting. One of my favorites is Venus, actually, because
it's about the same size and it's very close to the Earth in the solar system.
Why has there been this divergent evolution between these two worlds that
are very similar? And I think understanding that problem would be very
interesting.
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