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

[Harder]

I´m not too confident my question about money & future missions will cut the grade amongst the many experts chipping in here. (Although I am not a "beancounter", honest!).

But my ten cents: I feel that the continuous presence of daily live data from Mars, near enough anyway, have substantially enlarged my world. What CNN did in the past to bring the world news into every house so to speak, did Steve & his team in making Mars a permanent feature in my daily news uptake. I watch less "old fashioned" TV these days, much less in fact, and instead I check the latest from Mars, Titan, various comets, and more. Not to mention the continuous pushing of the technology envelope whilst thinking about new opportunities & challenges for solar system exploration.

Think about it... our lives have been enriched tremendously.

Thus for me the big thing is: is how can we make the daily news from Mars a permanent thing?

3 Cheers for Steve!