 an outreach coordinator for New Mexico at SCORE, and I'm your host this evening for this opening keynote. To start our opening keynote, I would like to introduce Anton Somali, the President-Elect of the New Mexico Academy of Science. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you everybody at EPSCORE who made this possible. And thanks our speaker, Dr. Larry Crumpler. I'm Anton Somali, President-Elect of the New Mexico Academy of Science, and I would like you to visit our website nmas.org and learn more about NMAS. We are working with EPSCORE to bring you this keynote speech and the annual symposium. First, I'll introduce our speaker, our keynote speaker. Thank you, Dr. Crumpler. Dr. Larry Crumpler is a research curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He received his doctorate from the University of Arizona in Planetary Sciences and MS from the University of New Mexico in Geology. Prior to the museum, he worked as a research scientist at Brown University. Currently, Dr. Crumpler is a member of the Perseverance Rover Mission Science Team and was a member of the development team for a ingenuity helicopter. Previously, he was a science team member on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity missions, Mars Odyssey Gamma Ray Spectrometer, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter High Resolution Camera. On the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Dr. Crumpler served as a long-term planning lead and downing information from the rovers on a daily basis from his office at the museum. On the Perseverance Mission, he is responsible for geologic context mapping of the terrain traversed by the rover, which you will see in his presentation. Last but not least, Dr. Crumpler has just completed a book about Mars and his personal journey as a Mars scientist entitled Mission to Mars that will be published by Harper Collins starting tomorrow. So look it up, Mission to Mars. Finally, Dr. Crumpler is a fellow of the Geological Society of America. So thanks for attending and let's thank and welcome our speaker, Dr. Larry Crumpler. Larry. You're still on mute though. Sorry, presumably you can hear me now, right? Yes, beautiful. Okay, good. Yeah, so forgot to unmute. That's a common characteristic of Zoom meetings. So anyway, so hopefully I won't run over time here. It's been a long week and I might tend to ramble, so I hopefully get through all of my slides. But I wanted to kind of present you with kind of a little overview of what we've been doing with the Perseverance Rover. And it's now Sol or Mars Day since landing, 256. We landed in February and we've been exploring the floor of a place called Jezero Crater, which I'll discuss in a second. And it's about, what, eight o'clock at night at Perseverance. So it's going to sleep right now for the night, no nighttime observations. And so this is a good time to talk about what we've been up to for the past several months. So let's dive right in. What I want to do is start off talking a little bit about how we got to where we are now with the Mars exploration. It wasn't that long ago, just 50 years ago, that we had never really seen Mars up close. We had a view that looked pretty much like the view over here on the right, basically telescopic views of Mars, in which all we could see were these strange dark blotches, maybe a polar cap and bright reddish terrain in between the dark blotches. And so that led to this map that's over here on the right hemisphere of this image in the center of the screen, that for a long time was really our view of Mars. It was a place that was mysterious. We knew it had an atmosphere. We knew it had potentially lots of interesting things going on in a long geologic history. But all we could see were these blotches. And it was really a great deal of hope was placed. And when we went to Mars finally with spacecraft or something to understand what these blotches were and understand the rest of Mars. And it turns out, as I'll show in a second, the blotches had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Because as time progressed, we got clear images of Mars. And Mars became more the image that we have over here on the left side of this image in the center of the screen, in which it became clear that the blotches were unrelated really to the physical characteristics of the planet Mars. Mars turned out to be a very dynamic geologic planet. It had volcanoes, such as the Tharsus volcanoes we see here, including the Great Olympus Mons volcano. And it had the canyons and it had wind streaks, clearly an atmosphere that was capable of blowing sand around and many, many other characteristics, including riverbeds and so on. So it turned out to be a very exciting planet. We only learned that after we started sending spacecraft there. And of course today our view is the view that we have over here on the far left, which is basically a view of looking at Mars at the surface as a very geologic place with real landscapes in a place that can be explored. Mars has the same surface area as all of the continents on the earth. So we've got a lot of terrain to explore. So essentially what we're embarking on here is nothing less than the exploration of a new world since you stricto. And we now have air photos, which are basically the high-resolution orbiter camera views of Mars, where we can see all sorts of interesting geology and layers, as well as all sorts of atmospheric effects on the surface. And of course now we're actually on the ground with rovers, ground-pounding, looking at individual outcrops, looking at individual rocks, looking at individual grains, crystals within the rocks, much as you would do with field geology here on the earth. So anyway, the whole arc of discovery from the late fifties to the current day is a journey to a new world. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that in the next slide. Basically our really detailed view of Mars began in 65 when we flew past Mars with Mariner 4 spacecraft, U.S. Mars Mariner 4 spacecraft. And it took a few grainy pictures that showed some craters. Everybody was very disappointed. They thought Mars was a lot more dynamic than that. It looked like the moon. But it wasn't until we sent several more spacecraft, Mariner 6 and 7, and then finally with 9 actually going into orbit and observing the surface, discovering that Mars actually had volcanoes and canyons and riverbeds that we began to realize that Mars was actually way more exciting than we originally thought. This sort of follows the pattern with Mars. We think we understand something about it. And then the next mission or the next observation we totally change our views totally and radically from what we held before. So I like to think of Mars as being kind of a trickster planet where it really likes to sort of do a bait and switch on us. So it's been doing that all along. So following the successful Mariner 9 mission, it was in the mid 70s. 75 we sent the Viking orbiters to Mars, taking even greater high resolution images globally of the planet. And on that mission we also sent the first successful landers down the Mars, the Viking landers 1 and 2 where we landed in two places on Mars and finally got a view of Mars as a very real place with real rocks and understood something about the nature of the rocks, the chemistry of the rocks, and the nature of the environment. And then literally there was a gap of 20 years and I'll talk a little bit about that in a second between the Viking missions and the next missions to Mars, the Mars Global Surveyor in the late 90s, along with the lander, the Sojourner rover, which was a small microwave oven sized rover that we first sent to Mars in 96 and it rode like 100 meters around the lander. And we started taking our first baby steps with how to actually control a rover on the surface of a distant planet. And then they're following a series of missions, orbiter missions, subsequent to that in the 2001 Mars Odyssey, which was the first look at the global chemistry of the surface of Mars. And then 2005 with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, that's where we sent the missions with the high-resolution camera, the high-rise camera that takes these images that look like air photos that you may see in news feeds from time to time. And then, of course, more recently the MAVEN spacecraft, which in 2013 was sent to study the atmosphere and the atmospheric history of Mars. Meanwhile, back on the surface, in 2004 we landed Spirit and Opportunity, the first real rovers to explore more than just beyond the lander location. And it was with those that we developed all the techniques that we used with modern rovers, how to control them, what the daily operations looked like, how to use instruments remotely to understand the geology the same way you would with field geology here on the earth. So we learned a lot with those and those propagated forward to our current rovers. But in the meantime, we also sent another lander, Phoenix, near the polar latitudes. And we learned about some of the chemistry of the surface in the high latitudes. And then, of course, Curiosity, the big rover, previous to perseverance, landed in 2012 in Gale Crater and was exploring the sediments that filled Gale Crater. Subsequently, in 2018, we had INSITE, which is the lander, not a rover, but it had onboard seismic instruments for really, for the first time, understanding the interior of Mars. We never knew what the size of the core of Mars was and how frequent Mars quakes were on Mars. But now we know because we've been observing Mars quakes on Mars with INSITE for many years now. And then, of course, in 2020, we sent Perseverance, which landed at the beginning of this year in February. And that's basically got a task that is on a track to provide samples that will be returned to Earth by a Mars sample return mission later in this decade. So that's kind of where we are in this grand arc of exploration of this new world. So just to cast this in another perspective, I thought it'd be interesting to lay out from 1960 all the way over to the present. Here are all the successful Mars missions that have gone to Mars. And the different colors on the bars here represent different countries that have sent spacecraft. So the first successful Mars missions were, of course, the United States with Mariner 4 and then Mariner 9 and with the Mariner 6 and 7. Then the Soviet Union or Russia had a successful orbiter along with the same time that Mariner 9 arrived. And, of course, then we went to Viking landers. And then there was this great long period with the exception of one little short-lived mission called Phobos 2 by the Russians of about 20 years in which we had no missions. So all of us were really building our knowledge of Mars essentially on the basis of what we learned from the Viking 1 and 2 orbiters and landers. And then, of course, we had Mars Global Surveyor in the late 90s. And then, of course, it's been a feast since then of various missions, including missions sent by the European Space Agency. And even India got into the act a few years ago. And then more recently, of course, China is now as well as the United Arab Emirates that just sent a spacecraft that arrived at Mars at about the same time as Perseverance. But anyway, this is sort of the long history of Mars exploration. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about how a career develops during that time period. So I placed on here on the bottom my career path during that time period. So basically, I got my start in elementary school just or essentially, I got my start before elementary school way back in the late 50s in which there were all these wonderful science fiction movies showing an exploration of other planets. And oddly enough, the surfaces of those planets were always very geological looking. It looked something like the American Southwest. And so that was very exciting. And in elementary school, I sort of continued interest both in the idea of exploration, other planets, space, and of course, Mars, because we were all starting to talk about Mars at that point with the inception of the space program. So I had this interest in both basically exploration and surfaces, kind of something about no exploring exotic alien places. And then an interest in space science, which sort of evolved from that, which was essentially astronomy and planetary astronomy. And that continued pretty much through high school until college. And I had to decide kind of what I was going to really study. And so we had a long discussion with advisors at that point. It wasn't clear at that time, this was the late 60s. It wasn't clear what you went into to become one of these new scientists doing Mars missions and things. So there was discussion with, is it astronomy or is it, you know, they're kind of looking at surfaces, maybe it's geology. And so I liked the idea of geology because I was interested in exploration. I was interested in the history of geology because, of course, as a kid, I was interested in fossils and dinosaurs. And I had studied a little bit about the associated earth history. So I decided to go into geology as a specialty. And so that continued pretty much through college and through the master's degree, where I did a lot of field geology, really becoming a geologist, essentially. But at the same time, I was exploring options and possibilities for planetary science, including participating in the Viking missions, Mars, the first lander and successful high resolution orbiters. And then since then, you know, other missions like Magellan Mission of Venus and then others to Mars subsequently. Meanwhile, on a separate track, I continued to be interested in this idea of field geology, where you go out and you understand geology. It's kind of like exploring new worlds when you do field geology. And I was particularly interested in volcanology and the volcanology of New Mexico, especially since this is the land of 1,000 volcanoes. So it's kind of interesting to look back. So basically, I had this dual interest that converged on one topic during the college years of career formation. And then it immediately split again into those same two fields, those same two areas. So the message here, I think, is that for anybody who doesn't know what they want to do, don't know what to go into, the idea is to kind of look back and see, there must be a couple of things that really hold your fascination. And to see which of those can be blended into one specialty that has the possibility of being used for, again, going back and looking at both of these specialties. And so that's kind of what happened to me. And so that's where I ended up here today, still being a field geologist, but also being a mission scientist on a mission to Mars, which is essentially doing, guess what, field geology on Mars. So that's kind of how it works. So that's something to think about as you look forward to your career. So I've taken up enough time now, probably spent more time than I should, but so it's time to get back to the rover, the mission. So the mission itself is a mission that is designed to go and collect samples. That's really the primary mission, the perseverance rover. And we want to collect these samples for potentially bringing samples back to Earth. And everybody knows that in order to understand the importance of a sample, you need to know its context. So knowing the geology of where those samples are collected is very important, hence the field geology and the understanding of the geologic context. The other important component of the mission, of course, is what we call astrobiology. That is possible life on other worlds, in this case on Mars. And so the goal of the mission for doing the geology and collecting the samples is to see if there is biologic potential on Mars in its past. And so that's a really fundamental goal. So that feeds back into the first goal. And then the final goal is to prepare for humans on Mars. And to do that, we're testing several technologies. The helicopter is one of them, but another one is an instrument called moxie, which is over here, where I talk about the instruments. Moxie is an experiment to actually generate oxygen from CO2. And we've run that several times. In fact, we run it quite frequently. And they're exploring different temperatures, environmental conditions for generating oxygen, but it works wonderfully. We've generated quite a bit of oxygen just literally from thin air. And Mars air is indeed thin at about 100ths of the atmospheric pressure of the Earth, but it's all carbon dioxide. So that's one of the instruments that we have on board Perseverance, but that's mostly a technology thing. Of course, we have the usual cameras. Mass Cam Z is a high resolution, color, zoomable, panoramic camera that can really see the surface in detail. It also has multi-spectral capabilities. So we can talk about the mineralogical composition of things by looking at the spectra. We have a thing called Super Cam, which is the laser that shoots rocks, developed by Roger Wiens at Los Alamos National Labs and run by Roger and his group. It has, of course, the famous laser zapper, but it also has a zoomable camera called Super, or RMI that can actually take telescopic views of distant terrains. And it also has a microphone, which we've used to listen to sounds on Mars, like the rover driving winds and helicopter noises. Then we have a weather station, META, which temperature, pressure, humidity, barometric pressure, also looks at clouds overhead and so on. And last but not least, of course, on the ends of the arm are some instruments that are in our field geological tools. And those include basically a high resolution microscope, Watson, and a couple of spectrometers that are actually pretty good at detecting biological organic compounds and other things. So that's for looking at things really up close. I mean, we're talking like micron scale. And then on the other side, we have another instrument called Pixel, which is basically our x-ray fluorescence, a spectrometer, which we use to get the composition of rocks. And this one has capability of looking at your pinpoint accuracy. So we can literally get the composition of individual mineral grains in a rock phase. And then of course, we have a drill and coring device for actually collecting samples, which are brought back to the rover and put on a device that basically stores them on board. And the way the sample thing operates, of course, is that we store them on board and then we cache them in a few locations on the surface for later retrieval. We'll talk about that in a second. And then last but not least is the Ingenuity Helicopter, which is basically a technology demonstration experiment. So it basically is essentially, for all intents and purposes, a separate mission that is operating at the same time and close to the same place as the rover. And we've successfully flown that now for 15 times on the surface of Mars, and it's proved wonderfully successful. And I'll spend some time talking about that in a second. So where did we land? So here's the yellow dot is where we landed. On the northwest edge of a thing called Isidus Planitia, which is a large ancient impact basin on Mars. On the edge of the Highland Terrain, which is some of the oldest terrain on Mars. And other landers, we'll zoom in on that in a second. Other landers in this hemisphere, US Curiosity rover in 2012 landed down here in Gale Crater. To the north of that little waves is the insight seismometer that landed in 2018. And then of course, a few weeks after Perseverance, the Chinese rover Xurong landed up here in an area called Utopia Planitia. And way down just off the bottom of this map is where Spirit landed back in 2004. But let's zoom in and find out why we were interested in this particular area. It's an area called Jezero Crater. It's about 30 kilometers across. And it has very interesting characteristics. There's a big river channel that comes into it. And we suspect that this was filled with a large lake at one time. And I'll show you why in a second. But this box here, for scale purposes, is the same scale as this box drawn around Albuquerque. So it's like a box that goes all the way from the base of the Sandia Mountains over to say the Unser Boulevard here. So we landed out here and I was near the university or something and we're going to be driving over here probably up until the North Valley, essentially. But let's zoom in on this box. So here's the box again. So here's the zoom in of that box. And so the idea is that here's the rim of Jezero Crater. And here there's a channel or river channel that comes into the crater. And where it enters, it has deposited a large delta. So the delta gives us a major clue that this crater was originally filled with water. It was a large lake because anytime you have a large body of water and you have a river entering it from the land, it deposits its sediments. As the water slows down, they settle out and you develop what we call a river delta. An interesting thing about deltas is there are very fine-grained sediments that settle out of the water. And as a consequence, they're good at preserving things. So not only are they good at preserving fine details and sediments, they're good at preserving things like fossils and even microscopic fossils. So the concept then is that we are looking at a delta where as the layers have been eroded back, there may be exposures of interesting things preserved by that deltaic environment. So we landed out here, however, about a kilometer away from the delta. And we've been embarking on a mission to actually explore this area of the crater floor, which we believe is covered with lava flows that are much later than the delta. And so we want to understand those and sample those because if we can bring those back to Earth, then we can get an age estimate, the maximum age of things here in the crater. And then later when we get ages from the rocks on the delta, we'll have a nice stratigraphy with a nice absolute Martian timescale. So the landing day, of course, was very spectacular because on this mission we actually had cameras and movie cameras taking pictures of the events. So they're pretty spectacular. In this frame, you can actually see the sky crane we descended from on cables to the surface as it was hovering over the Martian surface. Meanwhile, there are pictures taken of the rover from the hovering rocket pack. And of course, once we landed, it flew off and the rover was left on the surface. So this is the view from the surface. Once we landed, we landed in this beautifully flat and safe place selected by the lander with what was called terrain relative navigation as a very flat and safe place. And there's the delta out in the distance. And there's the rim of Jezero crater in the far distance. And here's some blast marks from the rocket pack as it was hovering as we were dropped to the surface at this location. This view shows you what you're kind of looking at in that overhead view again. So rim of the crater here. And this peak right here is a remnant of Delta that we'll see again in a second sitting out there alone out in the terrain. So the Delta has actually been kind of eroded back. So that's great. So that means all the layers have been exposed and whatnot. So that's the view from the landing site. And of course, we spent the first 60 sols or Mars days deploying the helicopter ingenuity to the surface. There was a series of complex maneuvers we had to execute to do that. So anyway, when all was said and done, we finally got the helicopter onto the surface and we drove off a little ways and immediately took this selfie showing a proud rover parent with its little helicopter offspring sitting on the surface. And so then we drove off a distance to observe the first flights of the helicopter. And the helicopter meanwhile took to the air for several flights. This is one of the, this is on the third flight of you from the color camera looking down at the surface from about 10 meters altitude. Here's the foot pad of the helicopter. There's the helicopter shadow down here. Here's all of our rover tracks. So the helicopters just took off from here. Here are the tracks where we drove off into the distance to observe it. So it just so happens that when this color camera, which looks obliquely across the surface, as we flew this way, we actually caught an image of the rover. And there it is in the upper left corner. So you can actually see we actually are on the surface of Mars. And you're kind of looking at the back end of the rover here. This is the radioisotope thermal generator. And there's the camera. It's kind of looking over its shoulder back at the helicopter taking a movie of the first flights. And here's one of those movies. So we actually did a series of flights near the rover up to the fifth flight, Sol 76. And here you can actually see the helicopter actually flying on the surface of Mars. First time an aerial vehicle flew on the surface of Mars. Incidentally, it also carried a small postage stamp fragment of the fabric from the original Wright Brothers flyer. So that piece of the Wright Brothers flyer actually flew, did a historic first flight on another planet as well as on the earth. And this is sort of the path that you're seeing in this movie here. So as we, this is the path we've taken since the landing day. So here's where we are today. There's the Delta up there. And there's kind of this rough terrain here. And there's the lava flows that sort of float up against it. We've been driving south along the margins of that, trying to understand the nature of this terrain and trying to get a look at this rough badlands here. And the only place we could find to enter it was way over here. So we drove all the way down here. And meanwhile, the green dots represent where the helicopter has landed during that traverse. So for a long time, we would be driving along the helicopter would jump in front of us and we would encounter it again. And then it would jump ahead again and we'd be encountered again. But then at this point, it actually flew all the way across an epic flight across the badlands over to this location, the place that nobody had ever seen before, selected its own landing site and landed over there. And then as subsequently, that was flight nine. And subsequently as executed a series six more flights in this terrain around here exploring their traverse possibilities as we tried to enter these badlands. But anyway, as we were driving along, sometimes we got the feeling that we're being stalked by the helicopter. Because here's a series of images taken at different locations as we were driving along. And every time we stopped, we would take the panorama and there was the helicopter sitting out there, staring at us almost like it was jeering at us saying, Hey, what's going on? I've been here for days. Why are you so slow? And that's just one of the beauties of a helicopter. It can cover the mince melts of terrain and get to places very quickly and see them from the air. So anyway, so that's kind of the helicopter and successful mini flights. And during those flights, it's taken these beautiful images, color images, as well as some downward looking black and white images we call nav cam images. And these are taken frequently enough we can actually turn these into movies. And so in a second, we'll look at a movie of one of those flights. And so this is up to flight 14. And this is some of the terrain that it's actually captured during those flights. And we've driven into the some of those and they've been wonderfully helpful. And I wanted to show you this image right here, looking down from the helicopter as it flew along this track, at a place where we had previously occupied the rover had moved on at that point. When the helicopter flew over it, but I've placed a model of the helicopter of the rover at the proper scale in the image to give you an idea of the scale looking down. So this is a helicopter color image looking down on the surface of Mars. There's our rover tracks. So you can see the wonderful details. So this is like, you a field geologist dream having a personal air photo machine taking images from 10 to 30 meters up of the train that you're trying to map. And let's see. So I think next I show a little movie where the helicopter takes off from this location. It's going to be the black and white downward looking movie as it flies over this big escarpment right here and flies out across this forbidden badlands all the way to the escarpment on the other side. And so that was pretty epic journey. But let's go look at that. So here's the nav cam looking down as it takes off. And it's now going to fly down to the southwest, which is up here. There's our rover tracks. And it's getting oriented. And so it's starting. And it's pretty impressive. It goes over to the escarpment here. It's flying over the rocks. Here's the escarpment up here. And it stops, gets its bearings because it might want to come back here if it has a problem out there. And so it takes off and flies this epic distance all the way across these dunes and outcrops of these badlands. And this, this movie goes on for a couple of minutes. Pretty much looks like what you're seeing here. Dunes with small outcrops. And it goes on until we reach the other side way over here. And here's the color image here looking out across the surface of Mars from about 30 meters altitude. Here's the foot pad again. Here's Jezero crater rim. There's the strange little ribbon of the delta sitting out there. That's where it's flying to. And escarpment on the other side of these badlands. So this gives you an idea of what it's like to fly on Mars at about an altitude of 30 meters. So wonderful instrument. And so hopefully we'll have many of those in the future. When we got to the other side, we did some more flights around here. And at one point it looked back where the rover had finally arrived at this point. And you can actually see the rover sitting way out there. And again, you can see the rover sitting. This is where we actually were working on our first sample coring activity, which I'll talk about in a second. Anyway, subsequently, it's flown many times. And it's been a very successful mission. Other things that we've been doing, of course, is understanding the regional geology. Here's the Mascam-Z, or sometimes referred to as Z-Cam telephoto view of this delta remnant that I talked about. It's named Kodiak. And the beauty of it is, of course, you can see, well, it looks like delta sediments. I mean, there's beautiful horizontal sediments and tilted sediments from where the front of a delta builds out. It's kind of a sloping surface. And then that gets eroded off as more deltaic sediments come in on top of it. There was a recent science paper that was published a couple of weeks ago about the first results from really intensely studying this with all of our zoomable cameras, supercam, RMI images, and so on. And it indeed has some interesting characteristics. And we've already learned a lot about the delta from that. And the background is the rim of Jezero Crater. So you can see it's like a mountain background. And we're going to climb over that, eventually, as the mission progresses. Other things we've been doing, you remember I mentioned the telescopic RMI capability of supercam. So here's a series of telescopic images we did of the edge of the delta as we were sitting way down here, licking way up at the edge of the delta over a kilometer away to understand the nature of these layers. And here's what that looks like. So a beautifully wonderful high resolution image from far away. And we've already analyzed these. There's a channel sand boulder actually conglomerate here. We've already learned that apparently a lot of this stuff was deposited here as the lake level was dropping with time. And there were a series of flood events that were depositing really coarse materials on top of some of the fine grain sediments. So anyway, that's some of the things we've been doing. The other thing is we take these images at the end of every drive. And almost every single one of them is photobombed by dust devils. And of course, these are the typical dust world winds or dust devils that you see here in New Mexico, same scale, same speed, same size, everything. And they happen like two o'clock in the afternoon, especially when the ground gets heated up and you get convection. And so we see these like it's one of those dust devil infested places. In fact, if you'd looked carefully at that movie of the helicopter earlier, flying in the background, there was a dust devil going on in the background of that. So anyway, lots of cool things happening. I've got a captive audience. So I always have to talk about what I'm doing on the mission. So I try to keep it short. But my goal is to do field geologic mapping on Mars or what we call in situ geologic mapping. And I summarize it as GXM, geologic context mapping. And the idea is that as you drive along, it's kind of like walking along, you can see out on either side of you, you can see things closer, very clear and things further out, not so clear. But the things close in, you can also touch and look at and analyze and understand their geology, their the type of rock or the lithology and so on. And so you can kind of project some of that out into your surroundings out to a limit to where you can see. And so that's kind of the concept of the investigation to take these the data we're collecting at the rover and map it into a series of levels of really capability of really precision, saying what you're looking at. And then, of course, identifying the attitude of units and so on. And so it goes out to a maximum of about 120 meters, but generally around 30 meters. And so you can map a little circle in a geologic map as you drive along. And you just keep overlapping these as you drive along. Also, the other instrument I forgot to mention about when I was talking about the instruments is the instrument mounted on the bottom of the rover called rimfax, which is a ground penetrating radar. And it's on Earth, we use that for some shallow, you know, investigations of the subsurface. So it's particularly used like for locating buried pipes and things like that. But we can also use it on Mars to a much greater depth because of the low water content of the soil allows radar signals to penetrate fairly deeply. And so anyway, it takes its measurements continuously as we drive along. So now we actually can see, you know, we almost have, you know, it looks almost like one of these seismograms of the cross sections of the Earth. You can actually see layers underneath your feet and map those to the layers or units that you're seeing on the surface and do true geologic section maps. So anyway, that's what that's all about. And so the way it works is you take the image and you map the geology on it. And in for distant things, you can actually see them really much better than they appear in this image because you can zoom in on them with your high resolution cameras, for instance, in this case, this outcrop taken by the Z cam. So now you just simply map that to the overhead projection of the nav cam 360 degree panorama to the surface. And you can just map the geology based on what you're seeing at your feet and what you're going to identify by local remote sensing. So I've done that along the entire traverse to date. And so this is just a map showing different colors showing different types of rock that we've seen along the traverse. And here's a zoom in part of it. This is where we are sitting today, preparing to do another drill core on one of these rocks out here in the padlands. So anyway, that's my investigation. And that's all I'll see about it. So just to give you an idea of what it's kind of like to rove on the surface of Mars and try to understand things. So here's a view around the Sol 137 again, I think, where the rover is sitting in here in the orbital high rise image, sitting on one of these strange polygonal patterns of rock. And looking off to the margins for these rocks here, this is what the scene looks like. So these rocks here, you can't see these, they're behind this ridge, but these rocks are these big, blocky, dense, dark blocks of rock, which we believe are probably the salted lava flows that they've been really broken up, probably by impacts and things. And then they're sitting on top of this train, which is, you know, broken up into these weird polygons that you can see on the surface. In fact, you can map the ones that you can see here. For instance, this one is this one, and this one out here is this one, and this dark band here is this band. So this gives you an idea of what it's like. And we're trying to understand the nature of the difference between these two, by the way, because it turns out the composition of these dark, massive, very dense looking rocks is the same as if these rocks down here, which are very granular and very really weathered looking. And not only that, you know, they have little nubs on them that consist of these dark rocks, and the transition is totally continuous. There's no contact or anything. So we're trying to understand what the heck these rocks are. And so we're still working on that. So we continue driving south, and we're again still in pretty much that same train. Looks very similar. Again, the granular polygonal terrain with lots of fractures going through it, and then the dark rocks in the distance. So we decided we about this time our quarrying instrument actually came online. It took many weeks, months to actually get many of the instruments ramped up to actual flight capability. That's another long story. But it finally came online. So we decided, you know, here we are. We're on this rock. We would like to understand the nature of it. We would like, in fact, to bring a sample back of it. So we undertook to do a series of experiments that culminated with the quarrying opportunity. And one of the experiments is abrading the surface. And you can see here we've abraded it. And this is prior to the activity where we blow the dust off and look at it with our microscopic imagers. So here's what that looks like. So here's the abrasion, then we hit it with a little puff of gas and blow the dust off. It's a wonderful tool. We don't have to use a brush. We just use a little puff of nitrogen gas to blow the dust off the outcrop. And so this is what the rock looked like up close then. Here's what's in your scale bar. Here's where the rock is on the surface in an overhead view. Again, looking at my detailed geologic map, all sorts of different lithologies mapped out here. Anyway, it's a very coarse-grained rock. You can see all sorts of crystals in it. There's lots of darkish stains in here. So it looks like it's a rock that's been very corroded, is the best word, even though it has essentially a basaltic chemistry and so on. There's some other weird things going on here. There's some calcium sulfates and other sulfates along with lots of iron oxides and things like that that are causing some of these stains. Then these pits are probably vesicles because we think most of these rocks are volcanic. And anyway, so we decided to go ahead and core it. And so here's a test of our coring device on the surface of Mars. There's Jezero crater in the background again. So indeed it works. It's kind of like a dentist holding the drill up and hitting it a couple of times. So then we applied that to the surface and drilled this wonderful hole. But it had this enormous pile of tealings around the hole. We looked into the hole, however, and yep, sure enough, we've removed something. But then when we looked in the tube, we held the coring tube up to the cameras. The sample tube was empty. So it was like a big mystery. What happened to our sample? What did it fall out when we pulled it out of the core? Is it underneath the rover? We looked all over the place. But ultimately, we decided that probably this rock is really pretty corroded and it's really the core simply pulverized. The rock, it was all exited as this enormous pile of tealings, which characteristically had the same volume as the hole. So we ended up with an empty sample tube, which we decided to call a Mars atmospheric sample. So while we decided what to do about that, we continued on our drive. And meanwhile, so what we think happened was the rock is really pretty rotten. It's probably a type of rock that here on the earth, we would call saprolite. That's a type of deep weathering where here, even back at the landing site, we saw a rock that had these typical fractured blocky patterns along the edges, lots of corrosion and the interior very granular looking, even though the rock itself probably initiated as a very dark, very fine grained rock. It's weathering into this sort of thing. And that's pretty typical of really deeply water corroded terrain throughout the earth. And Mars was a very wet place early in its history. So I suspect that's what's happened to some of these rocks. In fact, we see those even here in New Mexico. Here's a typical New Mexico basalt. But in this case, it was actually underneath the water in a glacial ice age lake for a long period of time. And the basalt along fractures was again corroded pretty much like that rock we just saw on Mars with kind of a rind around the outside weathering to kind of the spherical pattern. And then formerly nice, smooth, dark basalt is now this very granular, very grainy looking material where clumps of grains are actually being weathered out. And maybe a more familiar example is the sandiogranic where you have these beautiful rounded boulders, which are really just one in member of the process of eroding out these nice angular blocks, which themselves have been really deeply weathered along their margins by previous 300 million years ago being at the bottom of an ocean. And so you get this kind of terrain that turns into these nice boulders that are very kind of granular. And then the grains themselves then shed off and make this type of very sandy gritty material that we call grus with the rounded blocks being called torres. So that's kind of what we're looking at probably on Mars, very corroded rock. So we continue driving along while we figured out what to do about this sampling problem. And I thought this would be a good place to just briefly mention, you know, I haven't talked about the rim facts data, but recall as rim facts drives, as we drive along, rim facts takes a continuous sounding profile beneath the rover. And so here's a sample of what the sounding profile of the radar looks like. So you can actually see tilted layers. And this agrees with our concept of what this terrain to the north of the traverse line here is. We think it's some material that's basically sort of tilted or dipping layers or tilted towards the south here. And we're looking at them as we cross them driving along the margin of this escarpment, which is capped by, again, these dark blocking materials. So we actually continued along this escarpment and visited the escarpment here. And I think yeah, and this is the view of the escarpment. So again, this is our very granular, very eroded, corroded type of rock. And here's the basaltic cap rock again, with a very kind of gradational contact at best. And so we decided not to sample, try to sample this stuff, but we wanted to sample this. So we continued driving along and got up on top of the escarpment where we could perhaps sample this stuff. And so that's what we did for our first successful sampling attempt. We drove up there and we started drilling on one of these dark basaltic rocks. This was Sol 180 at this point. And so we actually did two core samples. Sometimes we like to collect two for contingency. And those were successful. And here's the celebratory selfie of the rover looking at its handiwork, doing a drill course in this rock on the surface of Mars. And we have this camera called cash cam that's on the rover, so that when we bring the core tube back to the rover and prepare to seal it up for storage, we can actually look down and characterize the sample that we've cored. So this is actually looking at the core sample. And so I think you recognize it looks very similar to the, you know, the braided place that we looked at before, but it's just a lot less corroded looking. There's a lot less iron oxides going on. There's a few other strange things happening, but it's a pretty good dense rock. And so it cored beautifully. And then of course it was sealed up and stored away on the rover for depositing at a couple of cash sites in the future. So this is the last we see of this rock before it returns to the earth, presumably at the end of this decade. And so there it is sealed up. So then we continued driving along the escarpment. So that was down here. And from the next saw, saw 199 to 200, we did a drive where the rover drove itself. We told it we wanted to go up here because we were going to launch off and try to understand these badlands from there because there was a way down from the escarpment there. And that was about 200 meters away. So we said, you know, okay, rover, do your thing. And so it drove itself. So this is a new capability with this rover where it has capability of driving itself quite rapidly over long distances. And so next what I'm going to do is show you a view from the navigation cameras on the rover, which are kind of like this, you know, the Mascam Z cameras, but a little bit lower resolution. That's the one that takes all these panoramas that we've been looking at. And it takes these images as it's driving along. So you can actually see what it's like for driving over the surface of Mars. And not only that, a rover that's self-driving. So here it is. So we're driving along. Here's the escarpment over on the right. So you can literally see it avoiding rocks as it drives along here, trying to weave its way in and out of everything to get up to its final stopping location right over here. And from that location, then we just simply turn to the right and then descend to the escarpment. Okay, so that's what we call autonav mode. And the rover does that a lot. And I hate it because what happens is when you go beyond 120 meters, you go below beyond the limits of my mapping. So every time we do one of these 200 meters rise, you might have this big gap in my map. But anyway, it gets us places quickly. And I suspect we're going to be doing a lot of that in the coming months because of something that's coming up. And I'll talk about that in a second. So anyway, so here's we drove down into that bad land. So this is a view of what the bad lands look like over on the right. So we're looking east here over the right is the escarpment we just drove along in that last image. So we drove all the way over here. And we're trying to understand what all this mess is, it's very complex, rugged relief. There are some outcrops on the tops of some of the ridges. And when we look at these, they look very fine grained, very finely laminated. And we have a lot of sedimentologists who want it to be layers. But you can also get laminations like this in a variety of dents rocks. But in any case, a lot of us think that these units may be volcanic ash, not dillteic sediments that we were hoping for. But anyway, we decided we would like to sample those. So we drove to an outcrop a little bit further on here. And this is this is where we're sitting today or to solve, as we say on Mars, using Mars terminology. And we're going to be drilling this rock. We just abraded it. We're going to be drilling it and hopefully collecting a sample, if we're lucky, to cache and bring back to earth eventually and kind of understand what this terrain is. And there are a couple of layers here. There's actually some basaltic rocks, again, sitting on top. There's a layer here that actually sitting on top of something that's a little bit less densely dense, dark material. And the distance is kind of a ridge to give you an idea of how rugged this terrain is. This is a ZCAM view of that distant view. And there's the rim of Jezero crater again. And so this is pretty rugged terrain. We don't want to drive through it to get to the delta. The delta is out of view just over the hill here. But we don't want to drive through it because it would take us forever winding our way in and out of all these ridges. So what we're going to do is counterintuitive as it may seem. It's actually easier if we just go back the way we can and go past the landing site and drive around the badlands, which are here, and then approach the delta on this relatively smooth terrain. So we're probably using a lot of auto-nav to do that. So we hope to start on that journey in a few weeks. We're probably using a lot of auto-nav, so a lot of long drives. But also we want to cover a couple of questions that we couldn't resolve on our way down here. So we'll be doing that. And then we'll be doing in this pretty flat terrain. We'll probably be doing a lot of auto-nav driving. And then arriving at the foot of the delta by the February of next year. And at that point we'll embark on a campaign of traversing up through the delta. This is just a high-rise image. We have color for this part, not this part. Driving up to the canyons, that'll be pretty spectacular. It'll be like driving in the Rio Porreco or something here on the earth. And exploring various elements of the delta and then eventually approaching the actual river valley that enters the crater rim. And then going up onto the crater rim and the ancient terrain beyond and hopefully an extended mission. So we've got a long ways to go. So there's going to be a lot of exciting driving and a lot of epic exploration of a new world coming up. And that's all going to be happening over the next few months as we drive to get to the base of the delta. And then it really gets exciting as we get into the delta. So that's it. I just wanted to remind you that my new book is basically being released tomorrow. It's called Missions to Mars. And it's all about the history of Mars exploration and what it's like to explore Mars. And you definitely will want a copy of that. Okay, so that's it. Time for questions. Back to you. This is Isis. And we have a few questions coming in from Q&A. Thank you so much for your fascinating talk. Let's see. We have one from Donovan Porterfield. Is the range of rovers more limited by power or our ability to remotely operate? Yeah, I'd have to say number two, our abilities are remotely operate. The power is pretty good. I mean, it does vary from day to day, but depending on what other activities we're doing, but we could probably go a lot further than we do. But the rover does have to find its way, especially when we try to go real far. And so that takes a little bit of time. And we also don't want to go much further than we can arguably understand where we're going to. So we like to kind of stick to something we can see from the ground in the distance, if not clearly, at least vaguely. So that's it's kind of the limitation right now. But you could imagine if we had like a helicopter skipping out in front of us during every drive, you know, we could use that data to go as far as we wanted to. Thank you. Thank you, Donovan, for that question. Next question is from Omar Arragones. Hello, my question for Dr. Crumpler is how Mars surface simulations progressed over the years? Simulations? Yeah, the simulations, obviously, have gotten a lot better because we've gotten much better data at, you know, simulating things. And in particular, we, you know, there's, it's mainly the details of the terrain that we've been lacking in. We, you know, could see the surface from various landers and so on. And those always have this distorted view of kind of sitting squatting down on the surface. It always looked pretty bad. So we usually design for much more rockier terrains than we've actually experienced in many cases. So, you know, we've certainly learned a lot as we've moved along. And I think we're, we're in a phase where we're about to learn even more about, you know, what we need in order to study Mars. For instance, right now, we really focus a lot of our energies on doing a lot of analytical things with rocks and samples. And a lot of the fundamental questions you would do if you were just walking on the surface here on the Earth are kind of, you know, kind of secondary. And so you end up kind of, kind of second guessing a lot of fundamental geologic things. So I think, you know, we're just learning a lot. And so as we learn, our simulations are getting better. And so that's the part of the nature of the game as you're exploring a new world. Okay, thank you, Larry. And thank you, Omar. Next question is from our very own associate director, Selena Penielly. She asks, you said that Mars is like a trickster. What has been the biggest surprise on this mission? Yeah, let's see on this mission. Well, you know, this is just like several previous missions where we go to a lake bed. We can see evidence that the lake was there, that there was a crater that was filled with a lake. There's got to be sediments. It's a sedimentary basin. And we go there, we see lava flows. That happened obviously with Spirit when it went to Goosev Crater. And we kind of knew there were going to be possibly lava flows here, but it was just kind of, I think, shocking for a lot of the sedimentary geologists to actually have to cope with that fact. So yeah, Mars loves to do that sort of thing. And over the years, it's done other things, you know, like, you know, well, like the first flyby mission, you know, we saw Mars as a dead planet craters and all that. And then we finally went there and actually started seeing the real Mars. We actually accidentally had just been observing the ancient cratered highlands of Mars. And when we got to see the rest of Mars, we discovered that it was really pretty dynamic planet. There's a lot of stuff going on. So I mean, every time we do something with Mars, we think we understand it and then it basically, you know, basically yanks the the cover off our eyes and we can actually see that it's not bad at all. It's something totally different. And that's just happened over and over and over again. Even trying to sample this rock here, although a bunch of us thought that that rock was pretty corroded to try to sample, I think for the general Mars community, you know, they were kind of shocked that you couldn't drill every rock, you know, that some rocks are just too weak. And Mars showed us that side. And, you know, it just goes on and on. So it's throughout the history of Mars. And so that was kind of a major theme in the book I wrote. In fact, I compared it Mars with the stories of Coyote and Native American legend, because it's a trickster, basically, that really causes you a lot of trouble. Basically, his ultimate goal was to teach you something. And so I think that's the way we've kind of evolved as we've explored Mars. Okay, we have a few more questions for you, Larry. Next question is from Ron. Will ingenuity help you with your GXM mapping with some dedicated flights? Well, it's not doing dedicated flights, but just the images that it has taken have already been used in my mapping to do detailed mapping on the surface. I find that it's as good as the panoramas that we take within 30 meters of things. So I've actually filled in a couple of gaps. In fact, that first gap in the mapping that happened with one of these long drives, and the helicopter actually flew across that gap. And so I used that to fill in the gap. So it's been wonderful. It's exactly what I anticipated having a helicopter would be in order to extend the institute geologic mapping. So it's the way to go. It would be wonderful to have one that flew every day above the rover and took images looking down. Okay, next question is from Christina. What is the next big capability or improvement that you and the other scientists would desire from the next exploration rover? That's a good question. So we've got a big enough community now that everybody has their favorite. And of course, the instrument specialist won't different more capable instruments or something. And for me, I would just like to have a rover that is able to drive a bit more easily without so much drama and visit things that would help you to understand the geologic context. So being a field geologist, I'm used to being able to walk this way and then walk that way and walk over here and kind of get a big picture of a local area and map it as opposed to just, you know, walking along the line and trying to map along build a view from a single traverse. So yeah, it's a more capable rover. Another, like I said, having actual aerial platform that actually flies with the rover. All of that would be really wonderful. And more importantly, I think a lot of us would just like to see more rovers less complicated so that we could send more through the surface and explore different parts of Mars and kind of open up the geology textbook of Mars. Okay, the very last question comes from our very own communication specialist, Brittany. She asks, do you think the baffry-elite-like rock on Mars preserve offal? Yeah, well, you know, the pixel and Sherlock actually looked at it. And I think they were just, it was trace amounts of something kind of anomalous. I don't think they found organic compounds, but you know, some odd chemicals and stuff like that. So I mean, it's possible that, you know, some of these deeply buried water-soaked rocks might actually have hosted, if life existed, hosted microbes. I mean, they certainly do well in the earth. So, you know, it's certainly the type of terrain you might look at in the future. I think there's been a lot of focus on sediments on Mars, which is kind of a simplistic, you know, kind of layer cake geology, you know, 15th century view of how geology works. The reality is that geology is a lot more than just sediments. There's a lot of life and preserved life in crystalline terrains, including some of the oldest rocks on the earth. So, yeah, I mean, it's worth looking. And it certainly, we've certainly seen some strange chemistry going on. So I wouldn't be surprised if someday we do see something if we see life at all anywhere. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Larry Crumpler. That was an amazing and fascinating talk regarding the timeline and the history of your prestigious work. So let's go ahead and share my screen one moment. Just for housekeeping purposes. Thank you all for coming out as well. Can we see that, Brittany? Fabulous. All right. Fabulous. Also, another big thank you to Dr. Larry Crumpler and then Anton Somali for his welcome and introduction as well. We have a couple of exciting programming notes coming up this week. On Tuesday, tomorrow, November 9th, at 10 a.m., we have a workshop by Dr. Anjali Motundani using Techno-Economic Analysis T to inform your R&D, and that will be held in the gather space. From 4 to 5 tomorrow, we have our synchronous poster session with our student presenters. Please join us. We have 19 posters from various disciplines from all around the state of New Mexico. On Wednesday, November 10th, we at 2 p.m., we have our panel venturing into space, how New Mexico faculty is reaching for the stars and taking students along the journey, and that's going to be quite exciting. Thursday, poster judging is open. It's also Veteran's Day. And then Friday, we conclude our program at 3 p.m. with student flash talks and our award ceremony for both our teachers and our poster winners. We couldn't do this without our fabulous sponsors. We have quite a lot of them. We have the New Mexico Academy of Science, New Mexico EPSCORE, the American Chemical Society, UNM Center for Waters in the Environment, and the New Mexico Space Grants. Also, again, thank you to the planning community for making this event possible. Thank you all again for hanging out a little bit after our program. We'll see you all soon and have a great evening.