Hi, I'm Doug Hemingway.
I'm a planetary scientist at the
Carnegie Institution for Science.
And this week at AGU, I'm going to
be talking about Mars and magnetism.
So unlike the earth, Mars does not
have a global magnetic field, uh,
but there are parts of the crust
that are really strongly magnetized,
which indicates that it did
have a magnetic field one
time early in its history,
but that it has since turned off.
And so it's really important for us to
understand how that magnetic field turned
off and why and maybe when.
And one of the things that
we're interested in right
now is we have this new
spacecraft called InSight, which
landed on Mars about a year ago.
And insight has a seismometer
on it. And so if we can,
with that seismometer detect the
presence of an inner core inside Mars,
that's going to be very informative.
It's going to tell us about
the composition of the core.
And it's also going to tell us that
it's going to be an indication that that
magnetic field might actually turn
back on and at sometime in the future.
So if you'd like to learn more, please
come to my talk at AGU on Wednesday.
