STEVE SQUYRES: At the time of the Viking mission, I was a
STEVE SQUYRES: Wow. Wow.
“bang-it-with-a-hammer” geologist. I would go out in the field, and I would do geological fieldwork. Fascinating science, but what I found disappointing about it was that there weren’t new places to discover. But then, I started working with the images from the Viking orbiters. And I would look down on Mars, using these pictures. And I had no idea what I was looking at, but the beauty of it was nobody did. This was seeing stuff nobody had ever seen before. And I knew that I was gonna do space exploration.
It’s funny to have such intense memories associated with a bunch of 40-year-old pixels. But I do, man. I remember the very first time I saw it.
ROB MANNING: The two Viking orbiters, as they looked down on Mars, they saw, “You know, that’s strange, there could be signs of past water flowing.” Was Mars once a green world with living things and blue oceans?
STEVE SQUYRES: We’d go there ourselves if we could, but we can’t. And I just knew from my training as a geologist that if we could get a rover down on the Martian surface, and it could move around and travel and actually look up close at rocks, we might find out the truth about Martian history. And so starting in the mid-’80s, I spent 10 years of writing proposals to NASA. But the proposals all failed. And I was facing the unpleasant possibility that I had just wasted an entire decade with nothing to show for it. ROB MANNING: But then, we pulled a team together at JPL. Could we actually put the rover that Steve Squyres imagined and use this landing system that we already designed? So we produced a proposal, and presented that to NASA.
VIKING ORBITER PHOTO OF THE SURFACE OF MARS
STEVE SQUYRES STUDYING VIKING ORBITER IMAGES
STEVE SQUYRES: And, we’d finally get the phone call that made our dream come true.
STEVE SQUYRES TESTING EARLY ROVER DESIGN
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