Eva L. Scheller

When it comes to Mars specifically, I don’t know what I would do without LPI’s. General media misrepresents Mars seemingly intentionally at times. It becomes really tough to know whats really going on. Enter LPI’s, and a light comes on. If you love X-Y graphs, this ones a treat. 

• What a wonderful slide at 6:50. Just a quick recap. phyllosilicates are especially notable because lavas on Earth work through cycles of melting and producing more phyllosilicates, which have a lower melting temperature but higher buoyancy. That's Earth, on Mars, the phyllosilicate heavy strata seem to be the default.   
• Slide at 13:30. Note how much more hydrated Noachian Mars is than Hesperian. That fact alone is such a big deal for so very many reasons. Among them is that Noachian Mars tends to be greatly elevated, and liquid water should run downhill. Also, elevated means profoundly less atmosphere for explorers to parachute with. That’s part of why probes tend to go to Hesperian or Amazonian locations.  
• Slide at 36:50, is one to take to heart. What goes into Mars, stays there.
• The slide at 40:20 is an image worth archiving. 
  

Back in the day it was more open to debate that the Hesperian might have had actual liquid water exposed to the sun for long periods. Nowadays the question of "warm wet Hesperian" is a matter of if some was still liquid under an ice cap or not. That's what this video is getting at subtly. At the time I post this the LPI is a year old, so Percy had just landed. Everywhere Percy can go is Hesperian, but there are some Noachian possibilities towards end-mission. Among Percy's top priorities is to see whats really going on with these shoreline deposits. How icy. 

It's amazing what a scientist can figure out with just a deuterium to hydrogen ratio, but the spirit of this video is to mark a prediction, that Percy is currently at the time of this post, testing.