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Very weird...my take... on the right is the flat ground surface produced by the RAT...on the left the ground surface has flaked away to reveal a totally homogenous 'bedding plane' with gentle ripples, of what looks like a dark smooth waxy substance... who knows...hydrocarbon?

whatever ...very odd looking

looks like I wasnt imagining crossbedding after all

having spent hundreds of millions so far, I can't  believe that they won't run them into the ground.

The martian environment is not that well understood. The telemetry data recording exactly how the machinery degrades and fails will provide useful info for the design of equipment for future long term missions. If immobilisation occurs because of a drive motor failure,  the mini-tes could still be sending back useful weather info long after a lander has ground to a halt. Eventually, I suppose, dust storms will cover the solar cells to an extent that the computer does not have enough power to continue operating.

I (hope!) expect they will just progressively whittle down the staff to a skeleton crew

oo er...

Its starting to look steep already. see latest pancam

he he ...yes... and theres me thinking you must be a Yank

yup. SoHo = South of Houston, part of lower Manhattan

top left on [http://www.insurance-y2k.com/nycsg/1map.gif]this map

They do weather, just a lot slower than the rock matrix. there are some heavily weathered examples on the floor of the crater - obviously the rock they weathered out of is long gone....

checkout this stereo pair

[http://www.hazyhills.com/mars3d/opportu … 0212b.html]http://www.hazyhills.com/mars3d/opportu … 0212b.html

not an anaglyph, so you need to be able to cross  your eyes and get the image back into focus. lock into the vertical line between the left and center images then cross your eyes. NB this image is panable. controls lurking at bottom of window

also a link to NASAs anaglyph from which this was derived if you can't manage the funny face thang...

nb
dont do this in public or people will think you've gone nuts!

If you are on a modem and  on a fixed monthly fee, a good ploy is to obtain some software which can download a specified section of a website automatically - you specify the start page, and the limits as to what is to be downloaded - otherwise the software follows all links and attempts to download the entire internet! Effectively the program is a simple spider as used by the web search sites

Set the software going when you go to bed and in the morning the section of the website in which you are interested will be sitting on your HD. On the Mac there is a program called "Web Devil" (shareware) which works fine for me. I'm sure similar exists for the PC.

the limitation is that "Web Devil" only works with straight HTML web pages. It does not interpret javascript, and also falls over with actively served content, so i think it would work with [http://www.lyle.org][http://www.lyle.org]www.lyle.org, but not with NASA

They're just eroded out vesicles - gas bubbles formed when the rock was liquid. Commonly seen in basalts. You can see one in the microphotos taken of Adirondack rock by Spirit. Extreme vesiculation gives a 'vesicular basalt' as seen by Pathfinder - "Barnacle Bill' rock

[http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgge … ition%3Duk]Basalt

http://mer.rlproject.com/index.php?act= … 204]Salami with peppercorns

I can quite understand the desire to make the most of Opportunities interplanetary geological 'hole-in-one' before pushing off for pastures new.

We all hope that the Rovers last for 90+ days, but on Mars theres no haul to the repair shop if anything malfunctions, so the best attitude has to be 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush'. Saying that, I'm still puzzled by the fact that no serious investigation of Sushi and Sashimi was attempted. To me both looked prime candidates for a closer look and 'ratting', and were most conveniently placed. The excuse that they were 'too dusty' is obvious nonsense. That Spirit then malfunctioned (fortunately only a file management problem) had me cussing somewhat. If they had not managed to salvage that situation I'm sure others would have been asking "Why no investigation of Sushi and Sashimi when you had the chance?"

Now Opportunity is faced by a long hard (but fortunately rock free) drive to the next area of interest. Many days of same ol' same ol'. Fingers crossed that it makes it  to the big crater. I can understand the desire to wring the current location dry. Fingers crossed for Spirit too, which appears to be facing ever rougher going the further it progresses.

As for "trickle-down drip-feedy" - thats exactly how it feels to me. We get the pretty pictures and the ooh ahh sunset, but wheres the beef? for example the spectrometer readings from inside the trenches? And so far no commentary on any of the 'interesting' features e.g. the nature of the soil, including the 'duracrust' and the soils fascinating microstrusture - including the fine dark threads I'm seeing everywhere, which appear to be involved in forming these micostructures. [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1M1312 … 1.JPG.html]Here's one thread - which is easy to spot as its sitting out in the open. from the ratted sphere, track diagonally down and to the left. Its sitting an a shallow light coloured depression which the Rat hasnt quite reached, close to the edge of the ratted area. There are a couple of shorter sections of 'thread' in the same depression....

And what is the rock in Opportunities crater - an ultra fine grain sedimentary? Whats the chemistry? Spectrometer results please. I expect we'll have to make up a new geological category for it - Duststone.

Its obviously not a basalt as it looks [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery]quite different to [http://www.keithlaney.com/SCI/V4.jpg]Adirondack when ratted.

the retrorocket back section and parachute of the lander. It was in the news a while ago when it was first spotted. There are also a couple of small very bright patches on the ground in the same general direction, which I'm guessing are bits of the airbags outer 'sacrificial' layer. or {more likely as the ground is flat and rock free) other bits of the entire lander assembly which detached en route to the ground.

I doubt that the lander sites will look much different a few hundred years. Erosional rates on Mars must be exceedingly slow. No rain, which contributes most to erosion on Earth, and the atmosphere is only 10Mb as opposed to 1000Mb on Earth. - only the very finest dust is lifted into the Martian atmosphere , compared to the sand which blasts rocks in the arid regions on Earth - all the Landers will need a few hundred years down the line  is a bit of dust off - very carefully! as I guess all exposed plastic/resin parts will be extremely brittle from UV flux by then.

[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2M1311 … 1.JPG.html]Crust and 'fuzz bunnies'

an excellent view of the salt/dust crust (?) produced by a Mossbauer print. A section of the crust appears to have fortuitously stuck to the Mossbauer, and been lifted out of shot

And we also see a couple very obvious examples of the 'fuzz bunnies' we've been seeing on the surface  - which look like small irregular balls of cotton wool/lint - in the Spirit and and Opportunity soil microphotos.

My favourite 'fuzz bunny' is the one in the [http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05213]Mystery soil animation which folds in half (with it's right side dissapearing!), when the crust heaves up and then opens up underneath it.

The 'mystery spheres' look to me to be :

a) light & shiny
b) dark and shiny
c) light and fuzzy

according to location

are the fuzz bunnies a fine accumulation of salt crystals/filaments? Surprised nobody has mentioned these so far, or the fine black filaments seen in many of the soil photos which appear to give the soil its interesting 'structure' - tubes, plates, ribbons, troughs and 'starfish' forms - into which the ultra fine dust is bound together by the threads.