Question: What experiment do you want to do next?

Lori-Ann Foley answered on 9 Mar 2020:

I have been running weather forecast models for Mars, looking at what the climate might have been like today and in the past. The model has been looking at the weather around the whole planet. Next I am going to run a smaller program to look at what the weather has been doing in one particular crater, both past and present. The crater is called Lyot crater (it has a wiki page here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyot_(Martian_crater)) and it is really interesting. There are glaciers there, under dust today but maybe on the surface in the past. There are channels where the water ran, probably in the past, but maybe more recently. And Lyot is where there may have been an ocean in the past. So I am looking at what the weather models say about conditions in the crater today and in the past. I compare what the model output says with pictures and maps of the crater today and try to see if I can tell when features in the crater formed. So where the glaciers are today, do the models show that ice formed a million years ago or a billion years ago! I am hoping it will tell us a lot about Lyot crater but also about Mars’s climate in the past, so we know what the climate may have been like in the past, when it may have had lots of water and interesting things.