It's a Red Planet Science Panel: NASA researchers and scientists will discuss several research areas that are pioneering the next giant leap in exploring Mars, including tracing evidence of liquid water on Mars, identifying mineral energy sources, detecting atomic oxygen in the Martian atmosphere and more. Brian Day is the Lead for Lunar and Planetary Mapping and Modeling at NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI). He oversees development of data visualization tools that are being used in landing site selection efforts including choosing the site for the first human missions to Mars. Previously, Brian worked on NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission to the Moon, which flew through and studied the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere; and NASA’s LCROSS lunar impactor mission which discovered deposits of water ice at the Moon’s South Pole. Brian has participated in various NASA Mars Analog Field Studies, supporting scientific research and robotic rover tests in extreme environments here on Earth. In 2007, he flew on the Aurigid-MAC mission to record fragments of comet Kiess entering Earth’s upper atmosphere. Thomas Bristow is a Space Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. His scientific training involved investigating how Earth’s climate and geochemistry changed during the period when animals first evolved. As the Principle Investigator of the CheMin instrument onboard the Mars Rover Curiosity he leads a team that studies ancient environmental conditions on Mars. Curtis works on SOFIA’s EXES instrument hardware, ensuring that it is maintained and ready for observations. When the EXES team gets new observing requests, he tests and optimizes the instrument settings to ensure the team has a good strategy for performing the observations. Curtis also controls the EXES instrument on all science observation flights and handles much of the data processing. He studied Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and earned his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Florida. He develops astronomical instruments used for mid-infrared spectroscopy. His science interests include star formation and molecules around young stars. Bill Reach began working in infrared astronomy at Cornell University in Jim Houck's lab, working on instrumentation for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, continuing to University of California, Berkeley to work with Carl Heiles and get his doctorate on interpretation of IRAS observations of the zodiacal light. He moved back across the country to work as a postdoc with Mike Hauser on the Cosmic Background Explorer, then across the Atlantic to work as a postdoc with Jean-Loup Puget and Francois Boulanger on the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). Bill returned to the US in 1997 to work at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, where he was leader of the instrument support team for the Infrared Array Camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Head of Science Staff for a while, and then the leader of the Planck group at IPAC, which developed the first compact source catalog from the Planck all-sky survey. Bill moved up to Northern California to work as the Associate Director for Science for SOFIA in 2010. Bill's research includes comets, interplanetary dust, the diffuse interstellar medium, interstellar dust, dust in other planetary systems, the Magellanic Clouds, and cosmic backgrounds. Chris' research focuses on life in extreme environments and the search for life on other worlds in our Solar System. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human exploration. He will focus on what we learned from Viking, Phoenix and Curiosity and how to search for life on Mars on future missions. Mary Beth Wilhelm is an early-career Planetary Scientist NASA Ames Research Center. She researches the preservation of fossil biomarkers in Mars analog environments such as the Atacama Desert in Chile and Antarctica. She has also investigated geologic features on modern Mars potentially formed by water and is a member of the Curiosity Rover science team. Ms. Wilhelm began working at NASA Ames when she was 16 years old. In 2012, she obtained her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and is now in the final year of her Planetary Science PhD program at Georgia Tech.