Planetary star: Steven Squyres is named ABC's 'Person of the Week'

Steven Squyres speaks to the media at a JPL press conference. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Nearly a week after the exploration rover Spirit landed on Mars, "ABC News/World News Tonight" named Cornell astronomer Steven Squyres, the mission's science-team leader, as its "Person of the Week."

"He and his colleagues have given us all a lot to be excited about," said ABC anchor Peter Jennings on the news program Jan. 9.

Appearing on the program, Squyres explained the importance of the rover mission and its role in history: "It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads. 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," he said.

Squyres is the second Cornell professor to be named the news program's top weekly personality. The late Carl Sagan, the notable Cornell astronomer and science educator, was named "Person of the Week" Dec. 20, 1996, the day he died after a two-year battle with bone-marrow disease. Sagan sat on Squyres' graduate committee at Cornell.

Squyres leads the team that developed and will operate the five-instrument science package on Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, which is scheduled to bounce down on the Martian surface on Jan. 24. ABC News described how Squyres splits his time between working at the Jet Propulsion Lab -- the mission manager in Pasadena, Calif. -- and teaching at Cornell. The news program showed old photographs of Squyres as a graduate student, teaching classes and organizing the science portion of the Mars mission.

Squyres described how he fell in love with space exploration: "I went into the place [at Cornell] where they kept the pictures that the Viking orbiter was sending back from Mars at that time, and I started flipping through those pictures. I came out of that room four hours later knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. ... What I liked about the planets and what really got me going on planetary exploration was the ability to take on a whole new world that people knew hardly anything about," he told ABC News.

After the ABC News segment aired, the Public Broadcasting System's (PBS) "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" held an eight-minute interview with Jim Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy, who is leading the rover panoramic camera team. From a television studio in Hollywood, Calif., Bell discussed how scientists and engineers are planning to move the rover off its lander using an alternate route because of difficulty in retracting the rover's deflated bounce-down airbags around the planned forward petal, or ramp.

Bell shared the latest optical images from the panoramic cameras, or Pancams, and the infrared data from the rover's Mini-TES instrument. He showed the reddish Martian hot spots and the rocky cool spots, explaining how this provided essential information for scientists in guiding the rover over the terrain of its landing site in Gusev crater.

And both Squyres and Bell also have been prominent during CNN TV's daily Mars rover coverage.

Earlier in the week, PBS aired the "Nova" program, "Mars: Dead or Alive." The program featured full descriptions of building the spacecraft and testing it. The show also included interviews with NASA engineers and featured Squyres. The program proved so popular when it originally aired Jan. 4 that the network opted to repeat it on Jan. 6, replete with the latest images sent back by the rover.