My style of leadership is to lead with the lightest touch that I possibly can.

These rovers are living on borrowed time. We're so past warranty on them. You try to push them hard every day because we're living day to day.

The thing that sets Mars apart is that it is the one planet that is enough like Earth that you can imagine life possibly once having taken hold there.

What we initially conceived as a fairly simple geologic experiment on Mars ultimately turned into humanity's first real overland expedition across another planet. Spirit explored just as we would have, seeing a distant hill, climbing it, and showing us the vista from the summit. And she did it in a way that allowed everyone on Earth to be part of the adventure.

I want to make as many people as possible feel like they are part of this adventure. We are going to give everybody a sense of what exploring the surface of another world is really like.

That's really what science is just trying to figure stuff out, and I like figuring stuff out.

There's no way to actually turn the rover off.