Q & A With Steve Squyres, Coming in September Options

[djellison]

As previously reported, there's a great lineup of speakers at the BAA out of London meeting on September 3rd - including MER Principle Investigator Steve Squyres.

Steve has kindly offered some of his time so that we can meet up and do a Q'n'A based on questions submitted by you lot.

Obviously - there will be loads and loads of questions you want to ask and only so much time in which to ask them - however - I'll do what I can to pick as many of the best as I can squeeze in in the time available.

There will be a write up here, obviously, and I will try and record it as an MP3 and post that here as well.

Steve's book 'Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet' is published next week - and a signed copy will be winging its way to the person submitting the best question! *

If you have questions you want me to pitch to Steve, then drop me an email to doug@rlproject.com with the subject SS Q&A

As a heads up - please take note of the other speakers at the BAA meeting - and if you have specific questions you'd like asked of them - I'll do my best to try and get them in after their presentations at the meeting. The last two ( Profs Greeley and Muller ) are on the Sunday and the Friday respectively, but I will be trying to get down to those presentations as well - but no promises.

-Prof. Carolyn Porco, Principal investigator, Cassini imaging system
-Prof. John Zarnecki, Principal investigator, Huygens surface science
-Prof. Mike A'Hearn, Principal Investigator, Deep Impact,
-Prof. Ron Greeley, Scientist on several planetary missions, Chairman of NASA & NAS Mars exploration panel
-Prof. Jan-Peter Muller, Scientist on Mars Express hi-resolution camera team, University College London.

Doug
* 'best' to be picked by SS and myself on the day

[Rxke]

deglr6328, that's a beautiful question...

I've tried to imagine that myself,

Steve, after-hours, one of the 'scenic' pics on the big screen, computers humming... Sitting there alone for a minute, before the rest of the crew comes in... Thinking of Carl....



Question: given that current scenarios talk about 500-ish days manned missions, and the rovers being able to function for that long... Has this changed the feelings re: feasibility of such stuff? The fact that the rovers keep functioning, does that mean we finally 'got it' how to do things there? That we're able to build stuff that lasts an arbitrary amount of time?

[SFJCody]

How about these:

Ignoring latitude restrictions, elevation restrictions and terrain restrictions imposed by EDL, if you could put a third MER rover anywhere on Mars, where would you put it and why?

Apart from the water story uncovered by Opportunity, which one discovery about Mars made by the MER rovers do you find to be the most scientifically compelling?

[odave]

Similar to SFJCody's first question:

* Given that it's been harder for Spirit to come up with evidence of past water, have you wished one of the alternate landing sites had been picked instead?

Not a valid question, really, since without Spirit going there we wouldn't know what we know now.

I'm glad Spirit put down in Gusev - it's a very interesting and photogenic place. And we may not have had all of those cool dust devil movies!