Green Planet

IN THE MONTH OF JUNE THE MARS ROVER Curiosity trekked across the Hanover Quad, through the Robert Frost Pass to Moosilauke Basin, where it stopped to take a photo of Baker River. Why was the rover bleeding green on the red planet? "For no other reason than the fact that I went to Dartmouth," says Yingst with a laugh. Yingst is a University of Wisconsin professor and the deputy principal investigator of the Mars Hand Lens Imager, the camera mounted at the end of Curiosity's arm. "I do a lot of the tactical, operational work: deciding where the rover's going, what type of images we want to take in what order—and figuring out the best science to do every day," she says. "Living on Mars is a little like being in college: You're surrounded by your friends and your colleagues and you're all working together to do something really exciting—and you're all a little sleep deprived."

Since landing on Mars in 2012, Curiosity has made momentous discoveries about the planet, including the identification of a mudstone—geological evidence for a habitable environment. "As far as I'm concerned, the Curiosity mission is already a success," says Yingst. "The purpose of Curiosity was to look for environments where life might have been able to arise and grow and live—the answer is already yes, but we want to know more about the context of how and why that environment occurred."

Currently, the rover is driving as fast as it can to Mount Sharp, located in the middle of the Gale Crater. "Mount Sharp is interesting to us because it is a tall stack of sedi- ment. Each of those layers gives you a different set of en- vironmental conditions under which they formed—this great cross section of Martian history," says Yingst. It's on this journey that Curiosity set foot on the Hanover Quad, a 1-kilometer square mapped and named after the College prior to the rover landing. Together with fellow Mars Science Lab colleague Lauren Edgar '07, Yingst had the privilege of titling Martian targets, sending a nod to her alma mater from another planet.