Richard Cook Quotations

We're in a state where we're not quite sure what's happened,

We're sprouting new ideas as we go along, and the plan is more or less the same.

There are a lot of different paths that you can be on. We just have to wait to see which one.

MSL is like a chemist on Mars. From a technological point of view, people will be fairly amazed by both the size and the capability of MSL. It will certainly be able to drive circles around MER to a certain extent. Not speed wise. But from how long MSL can go every day...it will be able to do much more.

Obviously, the entry, decent and landing is a very big challenge. I think we're going down the path...retiring a lot of the risk in the technology. But there's still the whole validation process...and still a lot of effort ahead to make that work.

If it lasts for five times that...I wouldn't be all that shocked. But we certainly don't want to go into it thinking that way.

We've looked at a lot of the technical issues and, hopefully, have our arms around a lot of them.

We are in the midst for proceeding with our planning for our next communications opportunity, which will begin tomorrow.

We didn't get a signal at 8:30 p.m. We hoped we would.

When you get below a certain level you have concerns about overheating the spacecraft or potentially breaking pieces of it off,

There is still a very real possibility that we may not hear anything during that whole period of time.

We're going to be able to learn much more from orbit. And I'm confident that in the end we'll pick out the best MSL landing site. If you only have one to send, you send it to the best place you can on Mars.

Both are super-complicated...taking very sophisticated lab experiments and compressing them down smaller to fit into a very tight space...as all rovers tend to be.

As time goes by, and I'm not telling you otherwise, we're less confident. At this point, though, we still have a lot of things we can try and we're doing that ... Everybody has the belief that we can still get a signal from the spacecraft.

Entry, descent and landing are very complex, and a lot of things have to go correctly. That's just part of the risk associated with the mission.

The trajectory didn't change. Our knowledge of it did.

The way it works is that you can spend forever continuing to do things. It could be this thing went wrong plus that thing went wrong and another thing went wrong. But the likelihood is extremely remote and so we sort of draw the line.

The signal we are looking for is very, very weak, about 1 watt of power -- or like looking for a Christmas tree light on Mars,

The tension on the team is up by several factors because of what happened.

This is where the idea of the movie originated, this is where the inspiration came from and this was the right place for the premiere.

It's a safety and welfare issue. It'll make our campus safer.

It potentially resulted in the loss of the mission.

It's not the same mission with the solar arrays. It would have to be a conscious decision on NASA's part to say we want to change the basic parameters of the mission.

It's like a battleship changing course. It takes a while, but we're moving in the right direction.

It is very much premature to say it is any particular cause.

At this point, we're still very confident that we're in orbit in Mars and that we're going to see the spacecraft signal in a few hours.

The international community has shown a real interest in being involved in our search, ... We appreciate their efforts and I think it shows that Mars is something that captivates everyone's imagination.

In a way, we feel somewhat complete in the sense that we did go through the things we thought were reasonable. Obviously at this point none of that panned out, but we gave it a good shot.

I know they have lots of theories and ideas, but I don't know that they're any closer to nailing things down.