The Watson Lectures offer a deep dive into the groundbreaking research and scientific discoveries at Caltech and JPL.
On Wednesday, March 10, at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, Ken Farley, W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences and the project scientist for the Mars 2020 mission, continues the 2020-2021 Watson Lecture season with a talk about "Perseverance on Mars."
After eight years of development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. In this Watson Lecture, Farley will describe how this highly capable rover will investigate rocks deposited billions of years ago at the bottom of a large lake (long since disappeared), seeking evidence of possible Martian life at that time. He will also look at how the rocks carefully collected by Perseverance during these explorations will provide the cargo for the first-ever effort to bring samples back to Earth from another planet. Farley has been on the Caltech faculty since 1993. He received his BS from Yale University in 1986 and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where he earned his PhD. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester and at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory before coming to Caltech. Farley became director of the Caltech Tectonics Observatory in 2003-04 and served as chair of GPS from 2004 to 2014. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and Geochemical Society and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Farley has led NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission as project scientist since 2013.Videos