Mars Rovers Still Range Over Red Planet

ITHACA, N.Y., July 31, 2005 — -- For the last year and a half, Steve Squyres has been living on Mars -- breathing its cold, thin air, digging at its rusty, red soil -- all from the safety of Earth.

"It's a breathtakingly beautiful place in a very stark way," he said. "There are mountains. There are deep canyons, spectacular craters. We've seen some of these things. Now, we've claimed the mountains. We've been down into the craters. We know what they look like."

Squyres is the principle investigator for the unmanned Spirit and Opportunity rovers that left for Mars in 2003. He says they have found "spectacular evidence" that Mars was once had pools of reddish water on its surface.

These days, Squyres works from his office at Cornell University, in upstate New York, where he is a professor of astronomy. He holds daily teleconferences with his team, some from other universities, most at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

That's where Squyres was in January 2004, when Spirit went tearing into the Martian atmosphere, slowed by its parachute and retro-rockets, landing safely, despite the odds. Opportunity followed three weeks later.

The rovers were sent to see if Mars could once have had liquid water and, therefore, perhaps been friendly to life. They found evidence within three months -- which was good, because in the Martian cold, the rovers were not expected to last much longer.

At some point, of course, a circuit will blow or a computer will crash, and one rover, then eventually the other, will die. But for now, both remain functioning more than a year beyond their expected lifespan.

"We're on day 550 of our 90-day mission," Squyres will often joke when he gives talks. He keeps having to raise the number.

Moving slowly and deliberately, automatically scanning the ground ahead of them to avoid hazards, the rovers have each gone miles from their landing sites, stopping to examine rocks, scrape away their outer layers and analyze their chemistry.

Many of their pictures are black and white, shot so that the engineers and scientists back on Earth can pick out potential targets of interest. Other pictures are in color, showing the rusty ground, the salmon-hued sky, and a ghostly blue shade that seems to settle over the Martian landscape at sunset.

"I feel when you look at the pictures that you get sort of a lonely feeling," Squyres said. "I mean, these rovers are really far from home. When you're out on the plains, man, there's nothing. And you look at those wheel tracks. And we've driven so far now that you look at those wheel tracks, and they just recede into the infinite distance. And, man, that little thing is just way on its own out there."