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My name is Lynn Carter I'm a research
space scientist, and I work with the

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Planetary Geodynamics group here at
Goddard. I study the geology of planetary

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surfaces: the Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus.
There's a lot of things you can learn

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about the Earth by studying other
planets. For example on the Earth we have

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a lot of erosive processes. You know,
rains, it washes parts of the surface

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away,
we have plate tectonics, which recycles

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the crust. But on other planets those
processes don't necessarily occur. So, for

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

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

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the size of the objects that we're
hitting each other in the early solar

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

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come in and do some image analysis, and
then do some writing about our

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scientific results. Sometimes I do
fieldwork in Hawaii or Arizona. We take a

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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. For example, on Mars

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we can use radars to sound all the way
to the bottom of Mars' polar caps and see

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all of this layering within the polar
caps. And on the

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Moon we're using it to study impact
cratering. Sometimes when an impact

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craters form a huge sheet of melt is
thrown out. This melted rock flows across

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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 and you can see this

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beautiful image of the melt flow coming
out of the crater. Looking ahead to the

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future there are so many different
things that we can learn about planetary

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science that would be interesting. One of
my favorites is Venus, actually, because

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it's about the same size and it's very
close to the Earth in the solar system.

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Why has there been this divergent
evolution between these two worlds that

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are very similar? And I think
understanding that problem would be very

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interesting.

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Music

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