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Hi, I’m Dr. Veronica Pinnick and I work on the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer for the 2018 Exo-Mars Rover.

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Music

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I am working on the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer, which is a very exciting instrument,

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which will look at the chemical make-up of the soil of Mars from a depth of 2 meters below the surface.

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We know a lot about the chemical make-up up on the surface from all of the previous Rover missions.

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But it the first chance that we’ll get to really look below the surface.

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Understanding the chemical make-up of Mars is important for a few reasons;

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one, we need to understand what resources we might potentially be harvesting when we send explorers.

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So we not only need to understand what’s happening on the surface of Mars but also

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once we start drilling down below the surface, what kind of resources can we expect to find.

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Understanding the chemical make-up of the Mars soil is important for us to understand potential hazards that humans might encounter and to make sure that we keep our explorers safe.

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The next step in understanding the chemical make-up of the red planet would be to,

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instead of sending these very sophisticated robots to do the chemistry, it would be much better to cache these samples,