DIX Planetary Science Seminar

After nearly 60 years of robotic space exploration, the headline "water on Mars" has appeared thousands of times. For understanding climate and geologic processes driving the evolution of terrestrial planets and searching for life elsewhere in the universe, Mars is a linchpin, recording a 4 billion year history of water and potentially habitable environments in its rock and ice record, a much longer intact record than found on Earth. For this 3CPE lecture, I'll review what we know and don't know about water on Mars: when were there environments with liquid water? what were those environments like and what sustained them? was there an ocean? where did all this water go? Is it in ice? what are the most important things that we don't know right now that should drive future research and exploration?