solar panels: yes, they'll get dusty. But friendly dust devils
have been a huge help to keeping rovers' panels clean. I hope to meet a few! 09:59 PM May 26, 2008 from web

Those three knobbly blue-green/white-ish "pebbles" just above the roller's path look different from the rocks others, don't they?

I've been having a lot of trouble getting onto the University of Arizona Phoenix website (http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/). Are Phoenix related sites really under denial of service attacks? Who would do that? What would be the point?

I've been having a lot of trouble getting onto the University of Arizona Phoenix website (http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/). Are Phoenix related sites really under denial of service attacks? Who would do that? What would be the point?

Well,I hope this guy is proud of himself.

It's like you go down and look through your legs, so the image when it came back was upside down. What we see is astounding, because looking south we see illuminated surface of soil, you can see shadow of leg struts on surface, and in foreground you see dark shadowed ground underneath the lander in shadow. A large part of the surface is uncovered by the exhaust of the thrusters. It is tabular, shiny, and smooth, and this is a strong indication that we are looking at the icy table just covered by a few centimeters of soil. The thrusters during the landing uncovered this part. And you can see some down grade from the foot to the center of the image. The purpose of this image was to look at the third leg. If you follow the shadows of the legs, you can see that the shadow is bent, strongly indicating the gradient in the surface, the soil is several centimeters higher than the smooth whitish surface. Clearly indicating that the surface is uncovered by the thrusters. The fact that you see relatively large parts being flat indicates a table of ice. So wherever we will be digging, we will hit ice after uncovering a few centimeters of soil. At top of image you can see three thrusters which were used during the landing.

Peter: We're doing 60 Mb per pass, 2 Odyssey passes per day, twice as much as we were offered. Starting to compress images less and take more filters. Even with non-use of MRO, we're still data rich.

King of Hearts is way to the left, just ot the left of national park line, for next 2 or 3 days we'll be doing digging operations.

We brought down web page to fix problem, but didn't lose anything.

Uwe: try to look for changes. We already repeated observation, but we don't expect to see differences on short interval. The sublimation rate may be a few microns per day. This depends on model you take, whether you add some ice or you lose some ice. It depends on wind velocity

Observation for today, high priority we introduce some additional observations of first leg, where we saw patch we now think is ice. This patch we can get close enough so that we can use color LEDs and can produce an RGB image which means we can produce a color image. We can tell albedo of a particular patch and give us much more confidence in decision whether this is really ice or not.