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Andy: ...deposits left behind. This entire area, thousands of years ago,

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during the last ice age was covered by thick glaciers. Every year one of the

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major components of the Lunar and Planetary Science Academy internship

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program is a field study to an analog site, a planetary analog

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site. So this year we selected the Channeled Scablands of eastern

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Washington state. The topographic features

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and the geomorphological features here are similar to a lot of things that we're seeing on Mars

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we're seeing huge river valleys cut by massive floods of water

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And we also see columnar jointed basalts, which is something

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that was recently discovered on Mars with the HiRISE aerial camera on

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the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. To look at these basalts, we took

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hand measurements. We measured their widths and a few other features to make

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inferences about their cooling history, and then we took aerial

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photographs using an RC plane, provided by a program called

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R-Step, and a hexacopter, which is a six-propellered helicopter

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and our goal was to achieve the same resolution in these photos as we're seeing

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in the HiRISE images of the Martian columnar basalts.

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It's really convenient when we can find somewhere on Earth that's similar to something

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we're seeing on another planet because it's a whole heck of a lot cheaper to study here than to

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study there. So we learn what's going on here and then we can sort of extrapolate our findings