Dr. Carol Stoker

Dr. Carol Stoker is a staff planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. Carol has a broad range of interests and skills; most of her recent work is focused on developing instruments and robotic systems for space exploration and testing them in terrestrial analog environments. She has led field experiments in the Antarctic, arctic, undersea, and deserts in the southwestern US to demonstrate robotic systems to search for life on other planets. Her projects have won six NASA group achievement awards and she has over 100 publications. She is actively involved in the robotic exploration of Mars and in planning for future human exploration. She is currently a coinvestigator on the Mars Phoenix mission that recently performed sampling near the north pole of Mars to search for habitable environments for life. She also currently leads activities to develop and test drilling systems to access the Martian subsurface to search for evidence of life.