Steven Squyres to speak on Founders Day

RELEASED: January 15, 2009

DANVILLE, KY—Steven W. Squyres, Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University and principal investigator for the science payload on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Project, will deliver the keynote address at Centre College's Founders Day ceremony on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009. The College will award Squyres an honorary doctor of humane letters degree during the ceremony. The event is free and open to the public and will be held at 11 a.m. in Newlin Hall of the College's Norton Center for the Arts on campus.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1981, Squyres spent five years as a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center before returning to Cornell as a faculty member. His main areas of scientific interest have been Mars and the moons of the outer planets. Research for which he is best known includes his study of the history and distribution of water on Mars and of the possible existence and habitability of a liquid water ocean on Europa, a moon of Jupiter.

Squyres has participated in many of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including the Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn, the Magellan mission to Venus, and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission. Along with his current work on MER, he is also a co-investigator on the 2003 Mars Express, 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2009 Mars Science Laboratory missions, a member of the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer Flight Investigation Team for the Mars Odyssey mission, and a member of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn.

In addition, Squyres has served as chair of the NASA Space Science Advisory Committee and as a member of the NASA Advisory Council. His awards include the American Astronomical Society's Harold C. Urey Prize, the Space Science Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Astronautical Society’s Carl Sagan Award, the National Space Society's Wernher von Braun Award, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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