The evidence from the instruments on the orbiters for frost/ice deposition even at near equatorial latitudes is overwhelming.

Furthemore this frost has been actually seen by the Opportunity landers.

To be precise I'm predicting such ponds will be seen during the period such low, dense fogs are seen over these near equatorial locations.

What revolutionary improvement over the discovery of possibly currently forming gullies by MGS would you predict for MRO?

As for ponds, I'm going to make a prediction that MRO will find small ponds located on Mars, oases if you will. These will be analogous to Don Juan pond in Antarctica.

Sol 762 (March 16, 2006): Opportunity started the sol in front of a long, flat trough and was able to drive just over 53 meters (174 feet) along this path.

Sol 763: The rover conducted atmospheric science and cloud observations.

Sol 764: Opportunity conducted targeted remote sensing, including panoramic camera images of "Red River Station" and "Kingfisher." It examined "Rush Springs" and "Red River Station" with the miniature thermal emission spectrometer. It also filmed three cloud movies at various times of day and did some other atmospheric science.

Sol 765: The rover drove 48.5 meters (159 feet), first over a small ripple, then down a trough to a patch of outcrop.

Sol 766: The rover drove 34.6 meters (114 feet), first down a trough, then crossing a few small ripples.

Sol 767: Opportunity drove approximately 44 meters (144 feet) over a few small ripples. Since there was no outcrop along the day's drive path, the team used more frequent slip checks. Before the drive, Opportunity acquired panoramic camera images of some nearby outcrop.

Sol 768: The Odyssey orbiter went into safe mode before Opportunity's afternoon UHF relay pass, so the team didn't have any information on how the rover performed on sol 767. For sol 768 the team planned a 70-minute direct-to-Earth communication session. Mars is getting farther from Earth, and even with a Deep Space Network dish antenna 34 meters (112 feet) in diameter, the slow downlink rate yielded only 6 megabits of data. However, this was enough to indicate that the planned activities on sol 767, including the drive, had been completed successfully.

Sol 769: Odyssey was still recovering from safe mode. Since the UHF downlink capability was unavailable, the planned activities for Opportunity for the day were only to collect two tau readings. (Tau is a measure of atmospheric opacity. Determining it requires very little data volume.) The rover did not use the deep-sleep mode.

Sol 770 (March 24, 2006): The sol's activities were planned knowing that the day could be the earliest that the rovers might regain communication-relay support from Odyssey. The team is planned several tau observations and a scan of sky and ground by the miniature thermal emission spectrometer. Opportunity did use the deep sleep mode.

Total odometry as of sol 768 (March 22, 2006): 6,908 meters (4.29 miles)

Looking back in time a little bit: Has there been any sucess in creating an aprox. true color image of Spirit Sol 675's Phobos eclipse while Phobos was in Mars' umbra? If so, anything that can be shared at present?

-- Pertinax

There is hope that a MER EDL 'science data set' will be delivered to PDS, but to date no such delivery has occurred.

The science profiles that were derived shortly after landing were internal MER project products which were intended to assess the validity of the atmospheric structure models against which the EDL process was defined. This was especially valuable for the 2nd landing. Those 'internal products' have not been delivered to the PDS as 'science' data.

There are some ongoing efforts to produce the derived science profiles and deliver those to PDS. [Why these different pathways must be followed to generate a data set rather than taking what was done previously by the mission is still unclear to me.]

I hope that within 6 months or so we will have the derived temperature, pressure, and density profiles.

Evidence, please.

additional heat produced by the dragging

Such liquid water even if at layers at the micron-scale is enough for...

Its too early to praise or dismiss the whole venture so lets wait for the 2nd or 3rd one, next launch is supposed to be in a few months