Tanya Harrison is a planetary scientist. She works on gathering information from mars. She is a PHD students in geology at the University of Western Ontario. Among all of those amazing things she is also a professional Photographer.

Yesterday My Peers and I had the pleasure to Skype with Tanya to ask her some questions about mars and what she does. We all had some questions to ask her that we were interested about learning.

My question was: How do the rovers function (How do they move).

Her answer was:

The rovers move very slowly, the fastest they move will be approximately 0.14 km. Opportunity, a rover that is on mars right now, Has been on mars for thirteen years and in all that time has only moved 40km. They have stopped it a couple of times to observe the spot it was in.  Since the rovers are computer controlled the operators could have to be at work in the middle of the night because Mars days are only twelve hours.

Some more interesting facts that our class learned from the Skype chat would be that we found out there is running water on Mars right now. We also learned that during one of there rovers landings, they didn’t think it landed on Mars, but in the end it actually did land.

Here is a picture of me asking my question to Tanya.

Here is a link to Tanya Harrisons website if you would like to learn more about her: http://tanyaofmars.com/

Below is our Skype chat: