Personally, most of my research isn't
necessarily directly related to the
exploration that the Mars 2020
Perseverance rover is going to be doing.
I mostly focus on exoplanets, planets
around other stars, you know, far beyond
Mars or any other planet in our solar
system. But, with that said, some of the
research I did earlier in my academic
career focused on subterranean
environments on Mars, or
environments under the ice cap of Mars
specifically looking at: could these
environments potentially have liquid
water and maybe even life up to the
present day? And, one of the instruments
on the Mars 2020 rover RIMFAX is a
ground-penetrating radar array that's
specifically going to measure and look
for these sorts of wet, subterranean
environments and I think that's really
exciting!
Personally, what I think would probably
be the most exciting discovery
would be something that comes out of one of the other instruments, SHERLOC, which is a Raman spectroscopy
instrument and then essentially what you
can use it to do is detect and identify
a whole wide range of chemical compounds
including potentially organic ones so I
think the most exciting thing that could
potentially come out would be
identification of something like say DNA
or chlorophyll something that's really
unambiguously biological in nature so we
can say with pretty good certainty that
there is or at least was life on Mars!
