PASADENA, Calif. -- "I've got the coolest job in the world," says Steven Squyres, the Cornell University astronomer who leads the science team on NASA's twin-rover mission to Mars. He also has some of the coolest students in the world working with him.

Squyres and his colleagues on the Mars Exploration Rover science team rely heavily, of course, on the expertise of graduate students, who will work closely with them during the exploration of the Martian surface by the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. But the team also will be depending on much younger students, some not even out of high school.

Spirit is scheduled to land on Mars on Jan. 3 at 11:35 p.m. EST. Opportunity will touch down Jan. 25 at 12:05 a.m. EST. The exploration is expected to last at least four months.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., is managing the rovers' science instruments.

According to Squyres, each student working on the Mars science program contributes something unique to the project, and all of them "are a pleasure to work with."

Take, for example, Katie Reedy and Kristen Curtis, seniors at Nardin Academy in Buffalo. This summer they were chosen to work with Squyres at JPL. The Buffalo students are among 26 high schoolers nationwide chosen by NASA to work with mission scientists as part of the Athena Student Interns Program. Reedy and Curtis will take turns in assisting Squyres for one week during the rovers' exploration of the Martian surface.

This fall the Nardin Academy students studied with Squyres to learn the astronomy, physics, geology, lab procedures, software programs and programming skills needed to work in the JPL mission control room.

Reedy recalls she was in kindergarten when she watched a demonstration of static electricity by a scientist who sparked her interest in science. "It was unforgettable," she says.

Says Curtis, "I had always been interested in space. I even went to space camp in Alabama one summer."

Other students working on the Mars mission include Ithaca College junior Emily Dean, who is taking a semester off from school to move to JPL to assist Squyres with his scheduling, as well as numerous other duties. A native Ithacan, Dean has been working with Squyres' rover science team at Cornell since she was a student at Lansing (N.Y.) High School. As a high school senior, she was sent to the Mojave Desert in California to take part in rover simulation trials. "Emily has been one of our guinea pigs for the internship program we have today," says Squyres.

Dean also helped build the full-scale model rover that shortly will go on display at the Smithsonian Institution's newly opened Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Va., near Dulles International Airport. She also designed T-shirts, logos and a Web site for the team and participated in calibrating the panoramic cameras to be carried by the two rovers.

Among the Cornell astronomy department graduate students who will be working with Squyres at JPL is Jason Soderblom, who will be examining the data that the rovers send back to Earth.

Soderblom started out at Cornell with a focus in geology, got involved with the Mars project by chance and has been hooked ever since.

Zoe Learner, another Cornell astronomy graduate student working at JPL, joined the rover science project in May 2002. At JPL she will study the daily images returned from the rovers and serve as a record keeper for the science team's comments on the images.

In December, Learner was an instructor for Marsapalooza, a nine-day education event that kicked off at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The program, funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and Passport to Knowledge, sent three engineers and three scientists to schools in five U.S. cities as part of NASA's efforts to promote excitement about studying mathematics and science.

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This release was prepared by Cornell News Service science-writer intern Rachel Solomon Einschlag.