Steven Squyres
Steven Squyres
Steven W. Squyresis the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the solar system such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres is principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. He is the recipient of the 2004 Carl Sagan Memorial Award and the 2009 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Communication in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
The search is difficult to achieve in a single mission. When we do a mission that is aimed at finding extant life, which probably requires liquid water at the surface, we will know exactly the place to go.
It was evidence that water at one time had saturated the ground here.
When you look at the most important accomplishments of the mission, a lot of them were due to Opportunity. It was the one that found the really powerful evidence for a habitable environment in Mars' past. It's sort have been the good luck rover for this whole thing.
When we opened our eyes, we saw bedrock exposed in the walls of the crater.
We're stunned by the diversity of rocks. This stuff looks like it was put into a blender.
This whole mission has surpassed all of our expectations.
We need to drive like hell and get to the hills before the winter sets in.
It sounds like a crazy way to land on Mars, but it's actually tried and tested.
It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads. What it does is it helps to address really fundamental questions of who we are, where we came from, by which I mean we can learn how life came about.
The Beagle 2 is excellent, ambitious. Ours are excellent, but we have different instrument packages and different aims. I don't see the material for the controversy.
It'll be spectacular if we can get there.
It's a cold, dry miserable place today. But we have got these tantalizing clues that, in the past, it used to be warmer and wetter.
There is certainly talk of getting another extension.
For much of its history, it was a very forbidding place.