Remember Carl Sagan? Remember how he popularized astronomy with his Cosmos series, made science understandable, and talked to us in a friendly, "c'mere, I wanna show you this cool stuff I found!" kinda way? Well, Carl is gone now, but he's got a successor, and if you don't know him by now, you haven't been living on the right planet. He's been on Mars, where have you been? :)

Not literally, of course, but Steve Squyres of Cornell University is the lead scientist for the Mars rover operations. More than that, he's the guy that dreamed them up. I'd seen Steve (I can call you Steve, right?) a few times in news briefs, but a few years ago, I watched the Nova program on the Mars landings, (Mars Dead or Alive) I became enamored. Not crush-like, but... just a general, "this guy is so cool" kind of enamored. The same way that Carl Sagan wound his way into our collective science-consciousness, so too has Steve Squyres. The guy is brilliant, he has a sense of humor, he's... excited by all this stuff. And he excites us, too, subtly giving us a foundation for understanding what he's talking about, teaching us, and generating an enthusiasm that's like a ski-run, racing to a goal, and leaving us breathless in anticipation of the next one. He can't wait to find stuff out, and we can't either, by the time he's had his way with us.

From 2004: "I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape.I still don't know what we're looking at."

He doesn't know. Wow! Have you ever met a scientist (other than Sagan) that could say that, and leave you thinking, "well, let's go find out, then!"

"... I can't find the words for it. I've been dreaming about this for so long, and there have been so many points along the way where it looked like we wouldn't get the things built, let alone put them on top of rockets and send them off to Mars, that the first time I stood next to the rover and watched it drive, it brought tears to my eyes. You know, I try to be this steely-eyed space explorer dude, but it was just too much seeing that. It was a phenomenal feeling."

And that's why we cheered right along with him when each of the rovers successfully landed, and called "Dad, I'm here, and I'm safe!"

If you don't know Steve Squyres yet, then take off your little tin foil hat, sit yourself down, and go click on that Nova link I gave you. The entire program is available online, as well as an interview with him, NASA simulations of the MER landings and more. Go!

Steve Squyres inspired me, and thousands of others across the globe with his infectious enthusiasm for astronomy, and for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. If you're not inspired by now, you're not into space.

Mark Davis, the producer of "MARS Dead or Alive" and "Welcome to Mars" says of Squyres, "...the scientist who had spent 10 years chasing the dream of sending robot geologists to Mars (see Man on a Mission) and who now faced a series of increasingly difficult challenges leading to the climax of landing on Mars. And it didn't hurt that he was the most articulate and charismatic space scientist to come along since Carl Sagan, his former mentor."

Three teams of scientists are reporting results of studies based on Steve Squyres' and Don Wilhelms' (of the USGS) theory of a giant impact on Mars having caused its unusual shape.

The lopsided shape of Mars may well be a result of a cataclysmic impact of a Pluto-size meteor billions of years ago, three teams of scientists are reporting. That would suggest that the lowlands of Mars's northern hemisphere are a single gigantic impact crater, the largest crater in the solar system.

Dr. Squyres said the new findings did not prove that his idea was right, but "they've really gone and made some new observations, which make a strong case that the idea really makes sense."

- New York Times

"We haven't proved the giant-impact hypothesis, but I think we've shifted the tide," said Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Andrews-Hanna and co-authors Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., report the new findings in the journal Nature this week.

A giant northern basin that covers about 40 percent of Mars' surface, sometimes called the Borealis basin, is the remains of a colossal impact early in the solar system's formation, the new analysis suggests. At 8,500 kilometers (5,300 miles) across, it is about four times wider than the next-biggest impact basin known, the Hellas basin on southern Mars. An accompanying report calculates that the impacting object that produced the Borealis basin must have been about 2,000 kiolometers (1,200 miles) across. That's larger than Pluto. - NASA Press Release.

(artist's image credit Jeff Andrews-Hanna)

Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission and Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, has been awarded the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science by the Franklin Institute.

The award, which is given for uncommon insight, skill or creativity, reads, in part:

"It is a rare occurrence when the principal investigator on a science project can capture a whole nation's fascination, but Steven Squyres did just that when he led the Mars Exploration Rover project, which landed the rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in January 2004. The daily photos of sunsets over Mars's horizon, dramatically wind-swept dunes, and deep Martian trenches helped re-ignite interest in the U.S. space program. The rovers did more than send back pretty pictures; they found evidence that there was once water on Mars, and they have imaged the surface of the red planet to help scientists understand how it formed. While the mission was originally expected to last just 90 days, the rovers continued to work long past their planned lifetime and are still gathering data on the surface of Mars over three years later. ... Squyres oversaw the science on it all."

- from Cornell's Chronicle Online, March 20, 2007