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My name is Lynn Carter.  I'm a research space scientist, and I work with the Planetary Geodynamics group here at Goddard.

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I study the geology of planetary surfaces: the Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus.

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There's a lot of things you can learn about the Earth by studying other planets.

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For example on the Earth we have a lot of erosive processes.

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You know, it rains, it washes parts of the surface away, we have plate tectonics, which recycles the crust.

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But on other planets those processes don't necessarily occur.

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So, for example, when we look at the Moon we're seeing a surface that's much older.

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We can use impact cratering on the Moon, to sort of understand how many impacts happened,

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the size of the objects that were hitting each other in the in the early solar system.

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Generally what I would do every day is a variety of things.

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Like I might come in and do some image analysis, and then do some writing about our scientific results.

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Sometimes I do field work in Hawaii or Arizona.

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We take a ground-penetrating radar out and we learn more about lava flows on the Earth.

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One of my favorite things is to use radar remote sensing.

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For example, on Mars we can use radars to sound all the way to the bottom of Mars' polar caps

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and see all this layering within the polar caps.

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And on the Moon we're using it to study impact cratering.

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Sometimes when an impact crater is formed a huge sheet of melt is thrown out.

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This melted rock flows across the surface, but then over time it's covered over by stuff from other impacts.

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But with the radar it just blows right through all of that

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and you can see this beautiful image of the melt flow coming out of the crater.

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Looking ahead to the future there are so many different things that we could learn

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about planetary science that would be interesting.

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One of my favorites is Venus, actually, because it's about the same size and it's very close to the Earth in the solar system.

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And why has there been this divergent evolution between these two worlds that are very similar?

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And I think understanding that problem will be very interesting.