Jim Garvin Quotations

Looking for life on Mars is such a big task that we really had to start by building a knowledge base. We started exploring Mars with Viking by asking some tough questions, which led to more complicated questions and more exploration. We have to think of it like school. We start in kindergarten learning the alphabet and build from there. In kindergarten, we don't jump right into calculus.

All of its dimensions, in fact, are similar to the other mesas. It's not exotic in any way.

It has obviously precipitated a lot of interesting thinking in our science community.

The students that are learning about Mars through this expedition are understanding the tools and technology to ask the right questions and get the right answers. They're the ones who will be traveling to Mars and making the great discoveries. They'll do the fun stuff.

We haven't conquered the moon. It's a planet the size of Africa and we've been to six spots the size of a large backyard or farm or ranch. That's not exploring. That's touching.

We believe hydrogen may be the clue, the fingerprint, of where water may be.

The elegance of Phoenix is its unprecedented ability to 'follow the modern water cycle' at the surface of Mars by investigating the geochemical signatures of water ice and the polar water transport story in the atmosphere.

Earth is the laboratory for future discoveries on Mars. Without examining Earth's extreme environments, we wouldn't understand how processes worked to shape the landscape, chemistry and life at the limits. Without that understanding, we couldn't draw conclusions about how life can develop on other planets. By examining these windows to Mars, scientists step out of the vicarious and into real features on Earth that function similarly to those on Mars.

Needless to say I am bouncing off the walls... and ecstatic.

That's the job Hubble had to do at the moon. It was a noteworthy undertaking. This is in some sense the miracle on the moon.