ASLI Weekly Meeting

Perseverance Rover on Mars by Dr. Kirsten Siebach. 

In a stunning engineering feat, Perseverance, the largest and most complex Mars rover yet, landed successfully on Mars on the floor of Jezero crater on February 18, 2021. Its mission is ambitious: seek signs of ancient life and collect samples for future return to Earth. Four Earth years into the mission, we have characterized rocks inside and outside the crater, collected 25 rock and sediment samples, and created the first extraterrestrial sample depot.  Dr. Siebach will share the motivation and context for Mars Sample Return, the science and technology that we use to select the samples, our new and evolving understanding of our neighboring planet, and how it teaches us about our own world.

Kirsten Siebach is an Assistant Professor in the Rice University Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and calls herself a Martian Geologist. She is currently a member of the Science and Operations Teams for the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance and the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, and previously worked on the science and engineering teams for the Phoenix Lander and the two Mars Exploration Rovers.

Kirsten completed her PhD in Geology at Caltech with Professor John Grotzinger, and then did postdoctoral research in geochemistry of Martian sediments with Professor Scott McLennan at Stony Brook University.