Huh, so the "coating" on Maz has more sulfur and chlorine than the soil (way more than clean basalt), and is especially high in bromine (as are the Meridiani rocks). And the "coating" is dark and hard.

If you soaked a hunk of basalt in salty, evaporating water, would you get a "hard, dark" coating of evaporites?

And it is very interesting to notice that nowhere in the image captions talking about the RATted areas does the word "blue" appear. They refer to the coating as dark, but they do not say, "Holy crayola, look at this blue stuff we found!". Weird.

Sort of a nice change of pace at both sites, I guess. Spirit finally found something other than basalt -- even if it's only a non-basalt coating on a basalt rock. Meanwhile, Opportunity may be looking at its *first* hunk of basalt.