The View from the Top of Husband Hill

chriscrick writes "After 14 months of climbing, the Mars rover Spirit has reached the summit of Husband Hill, 269 feet above the edge of the Martian plain. The panoramic view from the top is spectacular. According to lead scientist Steve Squyres, 'What field geologists typically do - and Spirit is a robotic field geologist - is you climb to the top of the nearest hill and take a look around so you get the lay of the land and figure out where you want to go.'"

Why must it look so normal?

[Hannah E. Davis]

I am always amazed by just how mundane pictures of Mars are. I'm not sure what I expect to see... something different anyway. Something "alien".

But no matter how many times I look at these pictures (and others before them), part of me is always surprised to see red sand and rocky dunes that remind me of PEI and a dusky orange sky that looks just like that above any major city on a cloudy night.

Surface Composition

[Nerd Systems]

I wonder what the surface composition on these hills is? I know it has taken a long time to climb up to the top. Is this because the surface of Mars is slippery and the rover slides down as it tries to come up, or is the surface hard enough for an easy ascent? It looks like from the picture as if it is a mix of sandy type surface and some hard.

Re:Everything you ever wanted to know about Spirit

[uberdave]

I don't see circuit diagrams. I don't see source code. I don't see blueprints. That site has almost nothing I want to know about Spirit.

Re:Everything you ever wanted to know about Spirit

[drsquare]

Well it's wikipedia. Very vague, very brief, very shallow, sometimes inaccurate information on lots of subjects. It's the place you to go for a brief overview of something you've never heard of, but don't expect it to give you the same information you'd get in a book.

That's what encyclopedias are, they're brief summaries. Otherwise they'd be 300m thick.