Phil Christensen Quotations

Maybe we can't afford not to have redundancy.

For us, it's a big deal. We just doubled our probability of succeeding.

It doesn't get any better than this. Having one there, one we're building and one we're planning for.

We call them the mother lode of hematite,

The time has come to take Martian studies a step further?and deeper.

It's getting to be a fairly old spacecraft and it's been having a number of issues; none of them are considered life-threatening,

The biggest dust storms don't usually begin until one or two months after perihelion, ... This one coming so early in the season makes me think Mars is heading for a spell of big dust storms.

It's completely self-sterilizing. We've made it through the first couple of rounds.

In many areas of Mars' middle latitudes, we see tantalizing evidence of dust-covered layers of snow or ice. THOR will aim for this material.

I'm interested in exploring mid-latitude areas of Mars that look like they're made of snow and ice.

Instead of all our eggs and 10 years of work in one basket, we have a second vehicle and a much higher chance of success.

The idea is to look at Mars and not think of it as a mysterious alien place.

The climate models predict that as the orbit of Mars evolves, the tilt of its spin axis changes.