[X] My Assistant

[slinted]

Steve Squyres has a podcast featured on nasa.gov (transcript here). He talks exclusively about Opportunity and the 'big picture' achieved by all the work done in Endurance (timed, no doubt, to coincide with the new papers being published now).

They mention a part 2, which will be posted next week, hopefully featuring some Spirit news and observations.

Quotes of note:

"...there was water beneath the ground, the water was probably very acid, it was probably sulfuric acid, the water table fluctuated, it would go up and it would go down. We don’t really understand what caused the water table fluctuations, but we see very, very clear evidence for it. Sometimes the water would rise all the way to the surface and you would actually have exposed water at the surface that might have lasted only for a very short period of time and the water would evaporate away and leave salts behind."

"...Mars is a place where there was water, there was water beneath the surface. We haven't found any evidence for waves, we haven't found any evidence for deep water, we haven't found any evidence for rainfall. That doesn't mean none of those things happened. But what we have found has been evidence for a much more limited sort of water activity where water just comes to the surface for brief periods. It could have been very different on other parts of the planet. "