This is Hotel Mars episode end. I'm John Batserp and David Livingston, Dr. Space, the

space show is here. My colleague and co-host and we're very, very, very privileged to be

speaking with Sonanda Sharma, an interdisciplinary scientist. That means that she goes in and

out of parts of the surface of Mars that are greatly fascinated. She works at JPL,

part of the planetary geosciences group, especially on an instrument I've learned with a very

long name called quickly Sherlock on perseverance, looking for evidence that is consistent with

some hypothesis about Mars, about our solar system, about how it was all put together.

Sonanda, you're so generous. I want to play a game with you that we've played before,

which is an unlimited budget, not waiting years for a sample return to going now. And other

parts of Mars are available as well. What do you want to know? What are the questions that

you would want answered with this unlimited budget? Thank you.

Well, amazing question and one that I thought about a bunch because we hit against the edges

so much of what we can do. But I would go under, I would go deep. I would want to go to the

Mars subsurface. So we know that some things like UV radiation and different types of ionizing

radiation and galactic cosmic rays will have effects on the surface of Mars. But the deeper

you go, we hope the more protected things like organic matter would be. So if I had an

unlimited budget, I would say, this is crazy. I would say get a bunch of autonomous swarm

rovers that can all go and spread across the entire surface of an area. We'll say like

the crater, for instance, and go on the surface and then go deeper and deeper and do like a

thorough, almost cross section like a cake search. You mean drilling, you want to drill and

you want them to drill in a pattern so that you can pick up what might be geological layers

underneath. Is that what you're describing? Yeah, in a very, very broad way. I think you

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