Prof. Steve Squyres from Cornell delivered an awe-inspiring lecture a few months ago about his work on the NASA Mars rovers, and later signed his book for the audience.

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or download the MP3 here.

It was cool how he made a point of answering questions from children in the audience first - a true successor to Carl Sagan. I wanted to ask him how they navigate if there is no GPS system on Mars - it seems like this is the answer, which would have to be supplemented with visual calibration of some sort.  As Mars has days shorter than here on Earth, every team member had specially-designed watches made that would run on Mars time, bringing them into work half an hour earlier every day!

You can download and play around with the software that the engineers at NASA use to control the rovers, using real data.  You can fly around Mars as well, using digital elevation data with software like this or this.  Astronomy is becoming more accessible now thanks to Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope and Google Sky.

Most of the deep-space probes actually only send data using a single radio sideband in order to save power, and are received through the Deep Space Network (I visited the Goldstone site in the Mojave desert outside L.A. a few years ago, which is actually situated on the live-fire Ft. Irwin military base).

Here are some of the pictures/videos from his slide deck:

sunset on Mars:

dusty solar panels:

purgatory dune (video of the wheels burning rubber here)

the landing site:

soil test:

parachute testing in the wind tunnel at Moffett Field (they have great tours)

Mars rover petals unfolding

wheels burning rubber

dust devils on Mars:

the Mars 2020 video referred to in the Q&A session is here.