This mission is going to kick off a
breathtakingly ambitious campaign to
return samples from Mars to earth and as
an astrobiologist who spends my life
working on biosignatures, there could be
nothing better. So, just to understand,
you know, most of what we do now is we try to
work with data that's coming back from
orbiters, coming back from rovers, and the
idea of having actual samples from Mars
that have been carefully selected and
returned to our planet in our
laboratories where we can scour them and
hit them with everything we've got
I mean, it's just gonna be a huge
paradigm shift for the kind of work we do.
Well, there's plenty of amazing things
that this mission could discover but
like every astrobiologist you ask I'm
going to say, of course, evidence for life
and I guess I should qualify that like
there are different types of life we
could find evidence for ancestrally
related life the the same kind of life
we have here on earth that perhaps are
just caught from the next planet over
and of course that would be tremendously
exciting in its own right it would give
us a chance to replay the tape of
evolution on another planet and
rerun that experiment and see what turns
out but what gets me most excited is
this idea of an independent Genesis; 
a kind of life that's unlike any life
that we've ever seen before
and specifically when I think about the
work that my group does we're really
interested in this idea of agnostic biosignatures
or a type of like evidence
for life that doesn't presuppose the
same molecular framework as life here on
earth or the same underlying
biochemistry and sometimes it feels
like trying to imagine a color that
you've never seen before. You know,
figuring out ways that we could look for
chemical complexity or unexpected
accumulations or elements or isotopes
that would be suggestive of life
that could be just completely different
from anything we'd seen before and I
just think that would be better than
really any other discovery in the
history of modern science.
