Steve Squyres
|
|
Squyres.gif
Steven W. Squyres (b. 1957) is a professor of astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the solar system such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres is principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. He is also a former student of the late Carl Sagan.
Squyres received his B.S. in Geology in 1978, his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1982, and then spent five years as a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center before returning to Cornell as a faculty member.
He has participated in many of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including the Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn, the Magellan to Venus, and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission. Along with his work on MER, he is also a co-investigator on the 2003 Mars Express and 2005 Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter missions, a member of the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer Flight Investigation Team for the Mars Odyssey mission, and a member of the imaging team for the Cassini to Saturn. Squyres recently served as Chair of the NASA Space Science Advisory Committee and as a member of the NASA Advisory Council.
Steven_squyres_backdrop.jpg
Squyres has been featured as ABC News's Person of the Week for January 9, 2004, and was noted by anchor Peter Jennings on World News Tonight that he "has gotten us all excited".
He has authored a book, due to release in August 2005, Roving Mars : Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet.
Squyres has said in an interview that he will not be the principal investigator for the Mars Science Laboratory, due to launch in 2009, as he could not be with his family during the major mission of the rovers. [1] (http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/04/8.19.04/Squyres_interview.html)
External links
- Cornell Astronomy Dept. (http://astro.cornell.edu/people/facstaff-detail.php?pers_id=112)
- Scientific American: Father of Spirit and Opportunity (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B5749-67A2-1150-A5AC83414B7F0000&ref=sciam&chanID=sa006) With the success of twin rovers on the Red Planet, Steven W. Squyres and his team are showing how to conduct robotic missions--and setting the stage for human exploration
- ABC News Person of the Week Article (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/PersonOfWeek/story?id=131839)