Person of the Week: Steven Squyres

Jan. 9 -- He sees science as the manifestation of curiosity — a way of figuring things out — and this week, Steven Squyres helped bring NASA and the nation to Mars.

"I can't ever remember not wanting to be a scientist. … [I had] just a curiosity about how things work," said Squyres. "That's really what science is just trying to figure stuff out, and I like figuring stuff out."

Last Saturday night, after traveling 300 million miles through space and making a fiery descent into the Red Planet's atmosphere, NASA's Spirit rover landed safely on Mars, sparking celebration in Mars Mission Control in Pasadena, Calif. The flawless landing was a morale boost to a space program that had had a rough year following the Columbia space shuttle disaster last February.

Just days into its three-month mission, the rover began sending postcard images back to Earth, giving hope to scientists that they will be able to discover whether there is life on Mars and that astronauts will someday be able to explore the planet.

"The way this vehicle lands, you can have a strong gust of wind at just the wrong moment or a sharp pointy rock at just the wrong place," Squyres said. "Everything can go perfectly, and it can still kill you."

Exploring Life’s Beginning

Squyres will oversee the Spirit rover's progress as it beams back images and attempts to reflect a sense of Mars' history. To Squyres, the Mars mission embodies what space exploration is all about.

"It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads," he said. "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."

Squyres, 47, is married and has two children. He splits his time between NASA in California and teaching astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He first realized he wanted to devote his life to space exploration when he was a geology student at Cornell.