Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Rewarding rock

Wow! My commands to Spirit to use her APXS and Moessbauer instruments on the rock last week apparently were the right ones and got through with no problems (sigh of relief here) and good thing too, because the rock is awesome! Obviously I can't post many details here, but I think I can say that it's probably some combination of a volcanic rock and Martian weathering, like many rocks we've seen, but in a weird and new and very interesting way. You might hear about it at LPSC next week.

LPSC is our big planetary science conference, held annually near the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It started as the Lunar Science Conference back in the day, then expanded to become the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. For the last couple of years it might as well have been the Martian and Other Planetary Science Conference. There's at least one Mars session every slot, and sometimes Mars goes head-to-head with itself. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has been up to!

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