ASU announced that Steve Squyres [right, credit NASA], the principal investigator for the science payload on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, received the 2010 Eugene Shoemaker Memorial Award today at Arizona State University.
The award, presented by ASU's BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, is given annually to a leading scientist in honor of his or her life and work. It is named for Shoemaker, who is known for pioneering research with his wife, Carolyn, in the field of asteroid and comet impacts.
As part of the honor of receiving the award, Steve delivered the annual Shoemaker Memorial Lecture. The title of his talk is "Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet."
I first got to know Steve when we were both PhD students (him at Cornell, me at Brown) working on the Voyager I data on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. We are among the co-authors on one of the early papers (The Tectonics of Ganymede, Nature, v295, #5847, p290-293) on those results.