Perhaps this King George rock was blasted here by an impactor from elsewhere on the planet? (I believe that is what Bounce Rock is).

If not. If King George formed where Spirit found it, then it still could have a watery origin. Don’t forget, the main reason Spirit is here is because Gusev is believe to have contained a lake at one time.

Side note: Up close, the Spirit Blueberries do resemble the Opportunity Blueberries. They have that same nice sheen to them.

That's Esperanza.

I hadn't noticed before, but the new HiRISE image makes the Faget-Korolev area look like a second Home Plate, half buried under the flanks of McCool Hill. If Home Plate is the site of an explosive eruption (magma encountering ground ice as it nears the surface, as seems to be the picture now), there might have been several places where this happened. Maybe Goddard (just south of this image) is another smaller vent... have we stumbled on a field of small volcanoes? That would be quite a finding in itself for Spirit (the interpretation relies on Spirit data, not HiRISE).

Phil

We should have images at 13 wavelengths. Do they match?

Now it's time to continue exploring Home Plate.

On Sol 1061 (December 28, 2006), however, the dust in the atmosphere at the Columbia Hills site increased, Spirit's power levels dropped to 267 watt hours, the lowest ever on the mission. "If the dust were to be elevated for an extended period of time, it could be life-threatening to the rover," said John Callas, MER project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), mission control for the rovers. "The opacity of the atmosphere was up around .9 and the power was way down," Arvidson confirmed Friday, December 29. That essentially meant the rover was in the dark.

With Spirit going into a 3-sol plan for New Year's and because the MER team had no way of knowing what was going to happen with the atmospheric opacity over the weekend, it decided to close out the experiment on Esperanza early and abort the weekend plan. "Instead, we did a drive that put us on a 7.4 degree tilt surface to the north," Arvidson said, and the rover's power rose back up to 285 watt hours, the level it was at for much of the winter at Low Ridge. "We feel a lot more comfortable now about the vehicle's survivability," Arvidson said. Spirit, which has driven about 6.9 kilometers (4.3 miles) and returned more than 88,500 images to date, is currently taking it easy, closing out 2006 by conducting atmospheric measurements and conserving energy.

Due to the unexpected longevity of the rovers, the web clock is temporarily unavailable while it updates to the 2007 calendar.

Stu, that photo shows great detail, do You have the NASA photo-number for it ( PIA-something ) ?

colorized panorama of target Montalva RAT brush:

colorized panorama of target Montalva RAT brush:

Looks like we're about to enter another transit season.