29 Quotes by Richard Cook

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,