At the Athena site

About time he got off his duff and put something out for us! :) Oh to be in his shoes...

The really cool thing here, of course, is that a groundwater environment like this would have been suitable for some simple forms of microbial life. That doesn't mean life was there, of course! But we flew this mission because we wanted to find out if Mars ever had habitable environments. And the answer, we now believe, is that it did.

After we announced all this to the world yesterday, I had a
reporter ask me if this finding meant "mission accomplished". My answer was, effectively, "yes and no". On the one hand, we set out to learn something about Mars, and we've done it. If both rovers died tomorrow, heaven forbid, I think this mission now would always be thought of as a success.

On the other hand, we've still got two very healthy rovers on the surface of Mars, and a lot more work to do. At Gusev, the best stuff may lie ahead, either in Bonneville crater or off towards the Columbia Hills. And at Meridiani, who knows what wonders lie outside this little crater that we landed in. In some sense, I'm not going to feel like we've really accomplished our mission until we've learned everything about Mars that we can possibly learn with these two wonderful machines of ours... and
that is still a long way off.