One of the most interesting exhibition at the American Association for the Advancement of Science was the one about Martian Rovers. The people who “fascinated” the audience were NASA’s Richard Cook, the designer of both Spirit and Opportunity and of the next Martian Rover, a Cornell geologist named Steven Squires which made Spirit and Opportunity capable of gathering as many samples possible, and Andrew Knoll, a planet scientist from Harvard which studies the idea of “water on Mars” whether if it supports life or not.

The Mars Science Lab Rover is 3-times heavier than Spirit and Opportunity, it’s powered by nuclear energy which should last for about 20 years. The MSL Rover is scheduled to take off next year and to reach Mars in 2010 - when it will land on the Red Planet it will analyze rocks and minerals with the help of a laser.

Cooks’s team had a hard time fitting the lander because of its tetrahedron shape, but they succeeded in the end; the rover features an on-board camera and it can do Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry or GCMS.

With MSL readying for blasting off, Steve Squyres reminded how his dreams vanished when Spirit landed in Gusev Crater because he thought it should be a lake-bed, but it was all covered in lava. Despite his disappointment, Spirit continued its mission and managed to gather some information about the rocks in Columbia Hills which are supposed to have been saturated by the transformation of ground water into steam.

Steve has no doubt that water existed on Mars, but the ratio of water to rocks was very low.

Now lets say something about the current location of Opportunity; is situated at Victoria Crater and it’s studying the geological history of Mars by examining the layers of the cliffs and until they it’s clear the fact that water flowed at the surface. Steve joked a little about the Victoria Crater mission : “It takes a lot of guts to drive an 8 hundred million dollar piece of equipment along the edge of a cliff on another planet”, mostly true but we think that professionals controlled the Opportunity rover so nothing went wrong.

Andrew Knoll sustains Steve Squyres and says that “surely there has been water, but the question is whether that water is habitable for life as we know it”. The result of the reports clearly show that the water is too salty and acidic that it doesn’t support life for any organisms known.

Water is so salty and acidic because the salt lowers the freezing point which means that water flowed at Mars’s surface but another theory says that as a result of asteroid “attacks” the ice was melted temporary and that is why MSL will be sent - to bring more information about the chemical composition of the water if existed.

Another debate was about the so called Martian gullies, structures in Mars’s surface which seem to have been chopped by water, but Squyres played-down the rumors by claiming that these structures were created in the last five years by avalanches.

We are very excited by the prospect of life on Mars and we are waiting for the day when the first human will step on the Red Planet!