Hey, I'm Flor Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

When someone steps off a spaceship onto the surface of Mars, what should they do first, you know, after the selfie?

My next guest and 100 or so of her scientist colleagues have thought a lot about that question,

and they've come up with

some recommendations. It's all in a new report just out from the National Academies of Sciences,

engineering, and medicine. Here to talk with me about it is the person whose name is at the top of

that report. Dr. Lindy Elkins Tanton is a planetary scientist, a very busy planetary scientist.

She's the director of UC Berkeley's

Space Sciences Laboratory and the head of NASA's Psyche Mission, a $1.2 billion program to investigate

the psyche asteroid. And she's the co-chair of the committee that came up with the Mars plan

called a science strategy for the human exploration of Mars.

Lindy, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much. It's great to join you.

This new report suggests that the top priority for going to Mars is searching for life.

How do we do that?

Yes. Searching for life is a part of a number of top priorities. NASA asked us to put them in

priority order. Number one is search for life. That doesn't mean that number two isn't super important.

And the great thing about this is the samples and the investigations we need to do to search

for life are also going to teach us so much more about mars and also about habitability and what

it's going to be like for humans there because in the end isn't this all about humans it's

about this unbelievable gigantic aspir, inspirational moment in human

history when humans go to Mars and we actually become interplanetary. And so... But wait, can I ask,

...