"Holy Smokes!" exclaimed one Nasa Engineer! Not only has Opportunity, the second of two Mars Exploration Rovers landed successfully on Mars (yesterday), but it has send back its first pictures - pictures of a landscape unlike any previously seen on any Mars mission! In what is now being called "and interplanetary hole in one" by some scientists, Opportunity not only landed on target, it actually landed inside a shallow impact crater... In the best of all possible scenarios, the rocks and soil samples scientists most wanted to study are now mere inches below the rover's tires! Plus, there is an exposed rock outcropping a short jaunt away... Needless to say, if you weren't excited by the possibilities when Spirit landed, then you ought to be now with Opportunity...

On a related note, the engineers have determined that the issue that plagued Spirit last week is a software issue - apparently the file system subroutines were causing issues in the onboard flash memory... Luckily, if it's software, it can be reprogrammed from here! (Let's see Microsoft, Dell or Gateway try that!) It may take a couple of weeks, but the prognosis is good to get Spirit once again roving around Mars!

So check the Mars Exploration Rover Mission web site often - with two rovers (one on each side of the planet) there is practically a 24-7 stream of new and interesting data and pictures arriving from Mars! One can only hope the scientists and engineers at Nasa find some time to sleep...