The major science stories from Spirit Options

[elakdawalla]

I really, really, really tried to do my own research this time without relying on all you rover-watchers here for help, but after a couple of weeks of banging my head against a wall I'm coming crawling to you for help. I need to produce (for both our website and a podcast) a simplified, big-picture view of what Spirit has accomplished on Mars over the past five years. I've basically got to summarize five years of the mission in four minutes of speaking. The operational details (the main mileposts on the drive) are very easy to figure out with the help of Tesheiner's maps and the discussions in the route map thread, so I've got that in hand. What I am having trouble with is figuring out the answers to the following science questions:

1. What is the summary story that can be told about the history of the interior of Gusev crater based on Spirit's observations? Geology is fundamentally a science devoted to telling a story about a landscape -- what's the basic story that the Gusev landscape is telling us, as revealed by Spirit?

2. What are the biggest science discoveries -- I'm talking about the top three or five stories -- that Spirit has made?

There's just so much material on Spirit that I'm having an awful time trying to see the forest for all the trees. All the journal articles that I can find are just devoted to one phase of the mission, so I can't figure out which stories are the most significant. I have all of Salley's great articles to go through, but again, they're so detail-rich that it's difficult to figure out what the big picture is; it's like looking at a Seurat painting up close.

Any help or pointers to any place where anybody has already produced some quality science summary would be greatly appreciated.

--Emily

[SpaceListener]

The close pictures on dust devil are the plus and unique of mission of Spirit. During the summer time, when Spirit was at the top of Hill Columbia, took an original activity: Astronomy taking some sky pictures when she had plenty of energy reserve to disipel. The other important Spirit's discovery was when she was heading toward Home Plate, trying to overcome a slope, her wheels have scratched the surface and found lots of sulfate....Indication of wathering of surface.

Finally, Spirit took lots of time on the highest point of Columbia hill taking the most complete picture around the Gusev!!!

And much more from others who can recall her stories...