So what are the profound goals
for exploring a planet like Mars?
First and foremost
the goals flow down from ennobling questions,
are we alone, what is our destiny?
And at Mars we can address those goals
and this is one of the unique aspects
of exploring the planet Mars.
We can ask the question are we alone?
through asking very simply as a goal
was Mars ever biologically active,
could we ever see the signs of past life
however it may have been manifested
or even today modern or extant life?
Now those are tough questions,
really challenging goals anywhere even here on Earth.
So we attacked those goals not only from the side of biology
and the biological reconnaissance of Mars
but through other windows into how a planet
might have been biologically active,
on Mars we have a climate history.
It's a planet with a profound history of changing climate,
we see that today.
So one of our goals
is to understand the climate history of Mars
and whether in that history there were ever periods in time
that were more climatically favorable to things
like life as we understand it on Earth.
But also to read the record books of climate on Mars
to inform how our own climate on Earth
has evolved and worked and been perturbed.
Mars is a climate system so is Earth
by comparing the two we learn.
So that's a goal.
Also as we look at a planet, any planet,
we have to work from the interior out,
planets are born hot, they evolve,
that history, the history we call thermal evolution
of the solid planet from the interior to the crust,
is the context on which you develop life, if it exists,
can provide the energy systems and a chemistry for life.
It also can interact with a climate system,
produce records that we read in the rocks,
in the land forms, in the ice sheets or whatever.
So for Mars our goals
embrace understanding the history of life,
asking whether we can approach it through climate,
looking at the solid planet and the interior,
and finally as an ultimate question in exploration
can we go there?
What are the prospects to prepare the way
for the ultimate voyage for humanity,
at least in the near term,
that is a mash of human beings exploring Mars themselves there,
boots or feet or whatever on the ground.
And that goal is challenging, it couples to all of the science
and it relates also to the safety of human exploration
in such a distant locale off our own planet.
When we go to Mars we will be introducing ourselves
as life to the Mars system.
We need to do so very carefully.
Now a common question with all of that then
is where do we get these goals from?
So the goals for Mars exploration come
from a community based interaction
that has been on-going for several decades really.
They start in a bottoms up way in which science works,
we ask questions,
we use processes such as peer review
to judge which investigations get funded,
at the level of the entire science community
these are bubbled up into a series of profound questions
which have become goals,
those are things are refined in interactions with august groups
such as the National Academy of Sciences.
On a period of every ten years, more or less,
these groups get together, they poll the community,
the science community, all interested parties,
they collect information, they hold town halls,
they reach out as far as they can
and then they consolidate them into a set of concrete goals
with recommendations to NASA for how to explore Mars.
Periodically also the community gets involved
and they rally behind emerging new discoveries
to tailor the goals a little because we learn new things
and that's been the history of Mars exploration.
So it's really a people's program
at the level of the science community
and in fact also the engineering community
who help us actually achieve the science.
So our goals are very simple, they come from the community,
they are tuned by discoveries and we move forward to the day
when we can ask effectively at Mars,
are we alone?