 The essence of what I do is try to understand how planets evolve. That's the basic question. Curiosity is a rover equipped with 11 scientific instruments that is probing the surface of Mars and trying to understand the history of the climate on Mars and whether humans could someday explore or live there and whether there was life ever there prior to now. On the days I'm on duty I get up, I log in remotely and either lead or participate in discussions about looking at the pictures that came down the night before and looking at all the rocks and deciding which of the tools we're going to employ that day and which targets we'll shoot the laser at or whatever technology we're going to use that day. I've been able to involve a lot of undergraduates in the mission and I'm probably one of the only people that brings undergraduates into the Curiosity group and that's been a joy. This summer I've had five undergraduates working in the lab and as part of their project they're engaged in the creation of fake rocks. Just as we are all made of star stuff, star stuff is used to make minerals and minerals are common on all planets. So understanding a mineral in a laboratory on Earth is absolutely fundamental to understanding the same mineral on any other body in the solar system. The question we're trying to answer is how can we create fundamental data on actual minerals that are mixed together that might be very similar to what we see from space? It's tremendously exciting because there aren't any data of this kind available in the amounts that are needed to do this research right. So we're really leading a whole new initiative that will benefit the field of planetary science and also of remote sensing of Earth for years to come. So it's really fun. I often say to the students, it could be you. The person who is probably going to be the first footsteps on Mars is probably going to be a woman and it's probably somebody that's in college or graduate school right now. So it's an incredible time in planetary science and the possibilities for students right now are really exciting.