What do blueberries, smiles and El Capitan all have in common? According to Steven Squyres, they can all be found on Mars.
Squyres, one of the principal investigators on NASA's Mars Explorer Rover project, spoke at Alumni Arena Wednesday night as the second speaker in UB's 18th annual Distinguished Speaker Series.
Squyres focused the lecture on his mission's obstacles and successes on the quest to learn if Mars once had water on its surface, the remnants of which include rocks that appear to smile and rust spots that look like blueberries.
"Tonight there is the debates with Bush versus Kerry, and a Yankee versus the Red Sox game, and all of you came out to see me talk," he opened with a smile.
Squyres quickly gained audience attention as he dove into the subject matter with an accompanying video depicting the rover blasting through the Earth's atmosphere and finally bouncing to a halt on the Martian surface protected by airbags.
According to Squyres, NASA sent two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to Mars to discover the geological history of the planet. Squyres said the rovers have proven to be much more successful than anticipated.
The first major find was the blueberries, though not exactly the kind of edible fruit found on Earth, Squyres said. The discovery was actually strange tiny balls consisting of hematite, similar to rust and often found where water has been.
In the large rock formation they named El Capitan, the rovers found Jarosite, which is only found near water, and is also only found near places of high acidity.
"On Earth, a place where this can be seen is the Rio Tinto, which has ruby red water that is actually acidic," Squyres, said. "On Mars, maybe this isn't really how it was, but I have this image of a ruby red sea under a pink Martian sky."
Squyres said Opportunity has also allowed scientists to observe the sedimentary rock they anticipated to find. Some of the rock appears to be smiling because the layers ripple with the ends curved up.
"Ripples that look like smiles only come from water," Squyres said, noting that wind cannot ripple like that.
Squyres added in an earlier press conference that the rovers were designed to last only three months, and travel no further than 600 meters. Nine months after landing on the Martian surface and having traveled several kilometers, he said Spirit and Opportunity are still going strong.
Squyres said while scientists expected to find sedimentary rocks - a sign of water - Spirit surprisingly encountered basalt in the first rock they looked at in detail.
"It's a piece of lava, part of a lava flow, so we realized that Mars faked us out," he said. "There may have been sediments, but they were covered by lava."
After climbing the Martian hills, Spirit did encounter rocks that had once been near water, Squyres said. Opportunity, however, has been much more successful in finding geological evidence of water on the Martian surface.
The rovers collected all this data with their high vision cameras, Squyres said. Each camera has two eyes with 20/20 vision, and each rover is equipped with infrared spectrometers, so that they can know the geological composition of rocks from a distance.
Squyres said additionally the rover has an arm with a drill and a rock hammer so the scientists can look to see what the compositions of the rocks are.
"As a matter of fact, the dimensions of the arm are exactly the dimensions of my arm," Squyres said. "But that's only a coincidence."
Many audience members said they were impressed with both the information Squyres gave in his speech and the way he gave it.
"He was very good at explaining very complicated matters, so that everyone could understand it," said Christian Soto, a sophomore nursing major. "He kept it very interesting."
Martin Pine, a retired biological scientist who formerly worked at the Roswell Cancer Institute, echoed Soto's sentiments.
"We came because we got free tickets, so we did not know what to expect, but it was fantastic, Pine said. "It was a trip to Mars in itself."
