 Well there's a science mystery in the shape of landscapes, both here on Earth as a tool to understand what environmental conditions were there, what happened when, but then especially applying to other worlds, Mars, the moon, Venus, the surfaces of asteroids, icy satellites, places we are now becoming exposed to as we try to unravel our local neighborhood in the universe. So at the scale in which those landscapes provide clues to tell us what happened and whether environments might have been habitable, a good place to look for life on another world, take Mars. That really excites me because it's kind of forensic, it's mathematical, so the first problem is how do you measure it? What do you need to know? Train geologists on Earth can look at some say, oh yeah, river ran there, the stand came in, blah blah blah, and there's a story and you go, wow, how did they know that? I mean it sounds like Sherlock Holmes does landscapes or CSI does rocks, so one needs to be trained. So how can you break that problem down? What is it about the shape and the texture at different scales that tells you about what's going on? The same way the clues at a murder scene would or whatever, and one can break it down that way and in many cases it comes down to geometries and math and geometry and simple measurements of shapes of things at very fine or different scales to build the information, the database, the data set to solve the problem. And nowadays that works on Earth and we're applying it to Mars. One of the things I've done in my career is apply that method as a way of remote sensing planetary landscapes to understand how the shapes of planets, the landscape forms we see, got to be the way they were. When one compares Earth and Mars and Venus, we see different assemblages of landscapes and so by measuring their topology, what's up and down at different scales, one can unravel how they might have gotten there. On Earth we can tell, we have other clues, we can go touch them, hit them with a rock, drive over them, but on those other worlds we're at the hands of robots or spacecraft in orbit, so we have to do it that way. So what that involves is measurement, the mathematics of measurement, we make some of the measurements that I've been working my whole career on using laser instruments that measure the distance from a spacecraft to the ground to inches as the spacecraft moves miles per second over the ground. And you put that together and say, how the heck can I get anything out of that? But thanks to math, we can put together, solve a few equations and boom, now we have the landscape. And now I know that that cargating landscape was where water once was versus another one where sand blue and I've now started to build a picture of environment. So I'm a student of the landscape using higher water math and measurements to build a picture that then I cast back and forward in time to understand the past and also to predict the future. And on Earth it's important to have predictive ability, is that big storm going to flood New Orleans or the barrier islands or California? And on Mars can I tell when the water was there long enough to maybe provide an environment that could have been conducive to life? Would that be the first place to go look for the right rocks to interrogate with other methods? So that's the thought process. Break the problem down. What do you need to know? What are the fingerprints? What are the clues? How do you measure them? And so in many cases it's the engineering of measurement systems. It's the mathematics of how you put together those measurements. Sometimes it's statistical. We don't know. There's lots of varieties. Mother Nature is infinitely creative. So we have to sort of classify. That one is this most of the time and that one is that. And again it's the detective work problem. And that's really what science is. Creative detective work to get to how and why things work in the bigger context of fundamental questions. At NASA we ask questions like are we alone? Is Earth like the only life out there? Many of us think no way. But we have to demonstrate progress in that question. What's our destiny? Where are we going as a planet, as a state of the universe, as a solar system, as a piece of a galaxy? Where are we going? What's the destiny function? And how do we get here? How did the current state of Earth in a solar system in the Milky Way in this universe get to be the way it was? And what are the grounding fundamental laws that Mother Nature used to make this time and place and state? Those are big problems. So you break them down. And so science, detective work with tools, often mathematics, good writing to describe the results because if we don't convey them, not too good. And to communicate them. Both verbally and meetings on the web. Now with social media, lots of new mechanisms to do so. So I mean, science is alive and well.