Mars coverage

Susan Kitchens has been doing a bang up job covering last evenings successful Mars Spirit landing. I was up pretty late and she was still doing updates when I went to bed. She's also had all kinds of updates today. My thanks to Susan and countless others who are doing a great job of keeping us on top of the Mars news.

Has it really been six and a half years since we last did this? It feels longer somehow. Perhaps the failures color my perceptions. Rather than a gradual ramp up of Mars based research data, we've been waiting expectantly ever since Pathfinder went silent. I know I became spoiled by the string of successes, perhaps everyone did. Every failure was a dashing of hopes and the silly reasons for failure didn't help matters. Some of us wondered, is this ever going to work again?

Obviously, it did, and once again we're gathering data from our nearest neighbor.

My congratulations to everyone who made this possible.