As time goes by, and I'm not telling you otherwise, we're less confident. At this point, though, we still have a lot of things we can try and we're doing that ... Everybody has the belief that we can still get a signal from the spacecraft. |
At this point, we're still very confident that we're in orbit in Mars and that we're going to see the spacecraft signal in a few hours. |
Both are super-complicated...taking very sophisticated lab experiments and compressing them down smaller to fit into a very tight space...as all rovers tend to be. |
Entry, descent and landing are very complex, and a lot of things have to go correctly. That's just part of the risk associated with the mission. |
I know they have lots of theories and ideas, but I don't know that they're any closer to nailing things down. |
If it lasts for five times that...I wouldn't be all that shocked. But we certainly don't want to go into it thinking that way. |
In a way, we feel somewhat complete in the sense that we did go through the things we thought were reasonable. Obviously at this point none of that panned out, but we gave it a good shot. |
It is very much premature to say it is any particular cause. |
It potentially resulted in the loss of the mission. |
It's a safety and welfare issue. It'll make our campus safer. |
It's like a battleship changing course. It takes a while, but we're moving in the right direction. |
It's not the same mission with the solar arrays. It would have to be a conscious decision on NASA's part to say we want to change the basic parameters of the mission. |
MSL is like a chemist on Mars. From a technological point of view, people will be fairly amazed by both the size and the capability of MSL. It will certainly be able to drive circles around MER to a certain extent. Not speed wise. But from how long MSL can go every day...it will be able to do much more. |
Obviously, the entry, decent and landing is a very big challenge. I think we're going down the path...retiring a lot of the risk in the technology. But there's still the whole validation process...and still a lot of effort ahead to make that work. |
The electorate have a judgment to make, and they will now make it on Maire. My own priority is never to give up. |