Aren from Vermont: The twin Mars rovers are exploring only two of what I assume are several potential future sites.
Is there already a long list of sites for MRO to scout, and if so, how will this spacecraft help you narrow down that list?
There are hundreds of sites already on the list. People have been studying Mars for, you know, 20 years or more now,
and a number of places have been identified that are interesting in the geology.
They are sites where we think there may have been, where we can see that there was water in the past.
With the rovers recently, we've seen water, evidence of water in the past; not so far in the distant past. So those are kinds of places
we might want to look at for landing sites in the future. With our mission,
we're going to be getting a lot clearer picture of what those sites look like.
We're going to see, in terms of visual images, we're going to see things at five times the resolution of what we've looked at in the past.
So we'll be able to get an even clearer idea of what the layering looks like there. Does it look like the layers have been deposited
by water or by wind? We'll be able to look at the composition of the surface so we can see, are there places where water has formed
those minerals? Minerals that have formed in the presence of water.
So we're going to be getting a lot clearer picture of the surface and we'll
be both narrowing down that very long list that we have now and undoubtedly adding new sites to it.
Well, that's about all the time we have, Dr. Smrekar. Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm sure our viewers will be watching this mission with even more excitement now.
Well, thanks. It's my pleasure.