Free Republic

LOS ANGELES - Spirit, the mountaineering rover that successfully scaled a Martian hill this summer, is searching for flatter ground. After two months at the summit of Husband Hill, the six-wheeled rover is making its descent toward a basin to the south where it will explore an outcrop dubbed "home plate" that looks like a baseball diamond from orbit. The solar-powered Spirit's yearlong climb to the peak marked a major feat for the rover, which along with its twin, Opportunity, landed on opposite ends of the Red Planet in 2004 in search of evidence of the past history of water...

A mixed (and beautiful) bag this week. If you go to the articles linked above the pictures, you can access a bigger (in the case of Katmai, much bigger) image. Bungle Bungle Range Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska For fun, two historical pictures of Novarupta and the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes soon after the eruption: AND finally, go to this Space Daily article to see a large version of the view that the Mars Rover Spirit had yesterday: Robot from Earth Climbs Mountain on Mars

The crippled Spirit rover remains in critical condition on the surface of Mars, engineers said today, the victim of ongoing electronic seizures that have caused its central computer to reboot itself more than 60 times over the past two days. Engineers successfully coaxed the rover to beam back limited engineering data during two brief communications sessions and they were relieved to discover the spacecraft's power system was providing the necessary life support. But Spirit's state of mind was clearly - and unusually - different in both sessions, ruling out any simple explanations for what might have gone wrong. "We have...