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So, the great thing about the Perseverance

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rover for my work,
is that it's actually going to bring,

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make it possible to bring back a piece of

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Mars and you know the exciting work that
we've been able to do with the Mars

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cience lander, the Curiosity rover, is
really great, you know, they've done some

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great science,
but there's nothing that quite compares

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to the kind of
fine-scale resolution work we're able to

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do in our laboratories here on earth so
actually getting that piece of the

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planet into our labs is so important.
And the other really exciting thing is

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these are drill cores we're bringing back

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and so we'll be able to look at chemistry

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at depth in those rocks and the important
thing about that is, you know, with

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with curiosity we've been able to find
very small organic molecules

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on the surface, but when we do those
analyses we're just using a hunk of rock.

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It's just a bulk analysis and so we
don't have any sense

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of what's just below the surface and
it's possible that the preservation

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deeper in the rock of those fragile
organic molecules is much

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better, and we'll be able to find that out with

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the combination of the really great labs
we have on Earth

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and the actual drill core samples.

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The most exciting thing to me about the
Perseverance rover

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is that we're sending along some really
great extras.

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We're sending along things we call
witness tubes and a drillable blank.

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So, a witness tube is what you would just
call a blank if you were doing an

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experiment here on Earth.
It's just a drill core that we're not

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going to collect any sample in
and when we get it back we'll be able to

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say if there was any effect that the
container has on the sample,

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because we will have had a core,
a witness tube,

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that went to Mars and came back.
And the great thing about the drillable blank,

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which is what we would call here on
Earth: a control.

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So, if there's any effect of the drilling,
of the collection,

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of the storage on the surface, of the
transport back on

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back and forth from Earth to Mars, we'll
be able to track that

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with this control that we've sent along
with the rover.

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So, this gives us a really great way of
understanding the noise floor