"The rocks, to a great extent, look swept clean. It's a much cleaner surface than what we had a right to hope for."

"It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads. What it does is it helps to address really fundamental questions of who we are, where we came from, by which I mean we can learn how life came about."

"We need to drive like hell and get to the hills before the winter sets in."

"This whole mission has surpassed all of our expectations."

"When we opened our eyes, we saw bedrock exposed in the walls of the crater."

"I want to make as many people as possible feel like they are part of this adventure. We are going to give everybody a sense of what exploring the surface of another world is really like."

"Having been given that public trust, we have a responsibility to share with the public."

"The thing that sets Mars apart is that it is the one planet that is enough like Earth that you can imagine life possibly once having taken hold there."

"These rovers are living on borrowed time. We're so past warranty on them. You try to push them hard every day because we're living day to day."

"We're stunned by the diversity of rocks. This stuff looks like it was put into a blender."

"That's really what science is just trying to figure stuff out, and I like figuring stuff out."

"You create a pile of dirt and then drive over it. We may have to learn to drive all over again."