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NASA's Spirit Mars rover has arrived at a site dubbed "Home Plate" within Gusev crater. But what the robot found has left scientists puzzled. As the Mars machinery relays images of the area, the sightseeing has sparked healthy debate within the team running the mission. "Well, so far it has been great," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration scientist at Cornell University. "It's the most spectacular layered rock we've ever seen at Gusev," he told SPACE.com. The images relayed so far by Spirit of Home Plate "really are stunning," Squyres added. "Many of us were pretty much reduced to...

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...

LOS ANGELES - From a lofty perch atop a Martian hill, NASA's Spirit rover has been soaking in a commanding view of a vast horizon since completing a difficult climb to the summit late last month. On Thursday, scientists released the first full-color panoramic picture of the landscape taken by the rover from its lookout point, showing the rover's tracks in the dust, flat plains of the surrounding Gusev Crater region, rugged terrain dubbed "the geologic promised land" by one scientist, distant plateaus on the crater rim and more hills. The solar-powered Spirit's yearlong ascent to the peak of Husband...

At its Gusev crater exploration site, the Spirit Mars rover is wheeling to the summit of Husband Hill and likely to complete its climb this week. "I think we’re going to make it," said the Mars Exploration Rover program’s lead scientist, Steve Squyres of Cornell University. New imagery from the robot shows a feature that is either the summit or something very close to it, he noted in a newly issued rover update on a Cornell University-based website. Spirit has wrapped up work in what’s called the Voltaire region, including a thorough sweep of a rock called "Assemblee" using science...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - NASA's Mars rover Spirit looks out over red slopes, valleys, plains and its own wheel tracks in a new 360-degree panorama released by Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Friday. The view from a point dubbed "Larry's Lookout" includes the summit of "Husband Hill," which Spirit has been climbing. The rover is about halfway up the hill and the summit is about 150 feet higher. "Spirit and the rover team worked hard over many weeks to get to this vantage point along the flanks of Husband Hill," said Jim Bell, the lead scientist for the panoramic cameras on...