Astonishing stuff...

New Update from Steve Squyres
"And then there's Home Plate. Wow. We've really pushed hard for this, with the rover planners executing one spectacular drive after another for days now. Today we pulled up in front of the north edge of Home Plate, and it's stunning... by far the best layering we've ever seen at Gusev. Check out the Pancam images from Sol 744 as soon as you have a chance. Only the fine-scale layering we've seen at Meridiani comes close.

It's too early to tell what we're dealing with. This stuff could be volcanic, it could have been formed by impact, or it could be sedimentary. Everything's on the table at this point. We've got a lot of work to do here.

Because it's a weekend, most of us were looking at these pictures from home when they first hit the ground, rather than in our offices, and most of the initial reactions came via email. It made for some pretty amusing email traffic, dominated mostly by phrases like "WOW!!!", "Holy Toledo", "just glued to the screen", "Superbowl? Who cares about the Superbowl?", and other exclamations not appropriate to print here. Real scientific stuff. :)

The outcrop right in front of us is named Gibson, after the baseball player Josh Gibson. It'll take a sol or two to approach it, and then we're going to have to put together some kind of IDD campaign. It's difficult terrain... rugged and steep. But the slopes face north, which is good for power, and the rover planners have gotten very good at dealing with this kind of stuff. So I'm optimistic.

The bottom line for now is that we've got a spectacular mystery in front of us, and far more questions than we have answers. I've got my guesses, of course, but Mars has fooled us so many times this mission that I'm going to keep them to myself. We'll just move in, do what we need to do, and see if we can figure out what's going on here. Stay tuned... it's going to be interesting for awhile."