When you talk about the men behind the missions to Mars, you will probably mention Dr. R. Stephen Saunders. A former Peace Corps geologist with a degree from Brown University, Saunders has worked as a program scientist on a number of missions to the Red Planet, including Mariner 9 (1971), Viking 1 (1975), Viking 2 (1975), and now, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which was launched last year. On Tuesday, Saunders visited Exley Science Center to lecture on the MRO, the latest innovation in Mars exploration.

“Mars is the most likely habitat for life as we know it,” Saunders told the small gathering of students and faculty.

According to Saunders, the planet’s stable atmosphere, solid surface, and proximity to the sun, as well as the almost singular evidence of water at some point in time, indicates the possibility of life on Mars.

“In the future we will continue to look for evidence of past, and even present, life,” he said.

Currently the MRO is transmitting the first round of data to NASA headquarters.

“We’re getting ready to operate all the instruments by this Friday,” he told the audience. “This MRO mission will have three times as much data as five previous missions [to Mars] put together.”

James Rea ’09 was enthusiastic to hear about such an important project in the works.

“It’s exciting to hear about this stuff from someone who’s so involved in the program,” Rea said. “The sheer volume of information that [Saunders] presented was overwhelming.”

At times, some attendees said, the presentation did flow more like an encyclopedia entry than a lecture. Saunders spent the last 45 minutes of his presentation expounding on the delicate instrumentation of the MRO—a complex weather satellite, geological explorer, and site finder. Saunders gave detailed explanations of the varying instruments needed for observing Mars at a range of distances from .3 meters to 1 kilometer., including the HiRise telescope, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), the Shallow Radar Antenna (SHARAD), the CTX device, and the Mars Global Surveyor.

Danny Koblenz ’10, expecting something altogether quite different from the lecture, said that he quickly lost interest.

“He spent an hour describing different types of radars,” Koblenz said. “If he was going to talk about the actual exploration of Mars, then it would have been far more exciting.”

Toward the conclusion of his presentation, Saunders began skipping through the immense amounts of data presented on his Power Point presentation and instead headed straight to pictures of the ancient, windswept canyons and deserts that cover the planet.

“We get a daily global weather map of Mars,” Saunders said. “Then we’ll have an idea of the weather patterns when we send humans there.”

Saunders made it evident that we are still very much in the dark when it comes to Mars.

“A lot of what we are learning about is how wind affects the surface,” he said.

Ultimately, though, it was Saunders’s promising vision for the future of space exploration that won over the assembled crowd.

“It’s inevitable that we’ll see people out in space in just a little bus going around,” he mused, twirling his left index finger.