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About

B. Sutter is a planetary scientist whose research focuses on the geochemistry of Mars, with particular emphasis on the planet's surface mineralogy and the search for organic compounds. As a key member of the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, Sutter made a landmark contribution by providing the first definitive evidence for calcium carbonate at the landing site, a discovery published in *Science* that has accumulated over 350 citations and fundamentally reshaped our understanding of Mars' past aqueous environment. Sutter also played a central role in detecting and characterizing oxychlorine species like perchlorate on the Martian surface, work that has become foundational for interpreting organic chemistry results from multiple missions. Beyond Mars, Sutter was instrumental in the MARTE project, a simulated robotic drilling mission in Río Tinto, Spain, which tested technologies for subsurface life detection. This work, along with the development of the Organic Free Blank for Phoenix's TEGA instrument, demonstrates Sutter's commitment to ensuring that Mars organic detection experiments are robust against terrestrial contamination. With a career bridging field analog studies and landed mission science, Sutter's research continues to inform the search for habitable environments and biosignatures on the Red Planet.